Category: Uncategorized

A revolution in archaeology has exposed the extraordinary extent of human influence over our planet’s past and its future

Lucas Stephens

is a senior research analyst at the Environmental Law and Policy Center in Chicago. He was a specialist researcher at the ArchaeoGLOBE project.

Erle Ellis

is a professor of geography and environmental systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He is a member of the Anthropocene Working Group, a fellow of the Global Land Programme, a senior fellow of the Breakthrough Institute, and an advisor to the Nature Needs Half movement. He is the author of Anthropocene: A Very Short Introduction (2018).

Dorian Fuller

is professor of archaeobotany at University College London.

Edited by Sally Davies

Humanity’s transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture is one of the most important developments in human and Earth history. Human societies, plant and animal populations, the makeup of the atmosphere, even the Earth’s surface – all were irreversibly transformed.

When asked about this transition, some people might be able to name the Neolithic Revolution or point to the Fertile Crescent on a map. This widespread understanding is the product of years of toil by archaeologists, who diligently unearthed the sickles, grinding stones and storage vessels that spoke to the birth of new technologies for growing crops and domesticating animals. The story they constructed went something like this: beginning in the Near East some 11,000 years ago, humans discovered how to control the reproduction of wheat and barley, which precipitated a rapid switch to farming. Within 500 to 1,000 years, a scattering of small farming villages sprang up, each with several hundred inhabitants eating bread, chickpeas and lentils, soon also herding sheep and goats in the hills, some keeping cattle.

This sedentary lifestyle spread, as farmers migrated from the Fertile Crescent through Turkey and, from there, over the Bosporus and across the Mediterranean into Europe. They moved east from Iran into South Asia and the Indian subcontinent, and south from the Levant into eastern Africa. As farmers and herders populated new areas, they cleared forests to make fields and brought their animals with them, forever changing local environments. Over time, agricultural advances allowed ever larger and denser settlements to flourish, eventually giving rise to cities and civilisations, such as those in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus and later others throughout the Mediterranean and elsewhere.

For many decades, the study of early agriculture centred on only a few other regions apart from the Fertile Crescent. In China, millet, rice and pigs gave rise to the first Chinese cities and dynasties. In southern Mexico, it was maize, squash and beans that were first cultivated and supported later civilisations such as the Olmecs or the Puebloans of the American Southwest. In Peru, native potato, quinoa and llamas were among species domesticated by 5,000 years ago that made later civilisations in the Andes possible. In each of these regions, the transition to agriculture set off trends of rising human populations and growing settlements that required increasing amounts of wood, clay and other raw materials from the surrounding environments.

Yet for all its sweep and influence, this picture of the spread of agriculture is incomplete. New technologies have changed how archaeology is practised, from the way we examine ancient food scraps at a molecular level, to the use of satellite photography to trace patterns of irrigation across entire landscapes. Recent discoveries are expanding our awareness of just how early, extensive and transformative humans’ use of land has been. The rise of agriculture was not a ‘point in time’ revolution that occurred only in a few regions, but rather a pervasive, socioecological shifting back and forth across fuzzy thresholds in many locations.

Bringing together the collective knowledge of more than 250 archaeologists, the ArchaeoGLOBE project in which we participated is the first global, crowdsourced database of archaeological expertise on land use over the past 10,000 years. It tells a completely different story of Earth’s transformation than is commonly acknowledged in the natural sciences. ArchaeoGLOBE reveals that human societies modified most of Earth’s biosphere much earlier and more profoundly than we thought – an insight that has serious implications for how we understand humanity’s relationship to nature and the planet as a whole.

Just as recent archaeological research has challenged old definitions of agriculture and blurred the lines between farmers and hunter-gatherers, it’s also leading us to rethink what nature means and where it is. The deep roots of how humanity transformed the globe pose a challenge to the emerging Anthropocene paradigm, in which human-caused environmental change is typically seen as a 20th-century or industrial-era phenomenon. Instead, it’s clearer than ever before that most places we think of as ‘pristine’ or ‘untouched’ have long relied on human societies to fill crucial ecological roles. As a consequence, trying to disentangle ‘natural’ ecosystems from those that people have managed for millennia is becoming less and less realistic, let alone desirable.

Our understanding of early agriculture derives mostly from the material remains of food – seeds, other plant remains and animal bones. Archaeologists traditionally document these finds from excavated sites and use them to track the dates and distribution of different people and practices. Over the past several decades, though, practitioners have become more skilled at spotting the earliest signatures of domestication, relying on cutting-edge advances in chemistry, biology, imaging and computer science.

Archaeologists have greatly improved their capacity to trace the evolution of crops, thanks to advances in our capacity to recover minute plant remains – from silica microfossils to attachment scars of cereals, where the seeds attach to the rest of the plant. Along with early crops, agricultural weeds and storage pests such as mice and weevils also appeared. Increasingly, we can identify a broader biotic community that emerged around the first villages and spread with agriculture. For example, weeds that originated in the Fertile Crescent alongside early wheat and barley crops also show up in the earliest agricultural communities in places such as Germany and Pakistan.

Collections of animal bones provide evidence of how herded creatures changed physically through the process of domestication. Butchering marks on bones can help reconstruct culling strategies. From the ages and sizes of animals, archaeologists can deduce the populations of herds in terms of age and sex ratios, all of which reveals how herding differed from hunting. Herding systems themselves also vary, with some focused only on producing meat, and others on milk and wool too.

The British Isles were transformed by imported crops, weeds and livestock from millennia earlier

Measurements of bones and seeds have made great strides with technologies such as geometric morphometrics – complex mathematical shape analysis that allows for a more nuanced understanding of how varieties evolved and moved between regions. Biomolecular methods have also multiplied. The recovery of amino acid profiles from fragmented animal bones, for example, has allowed us to discern which animals they came from, even when they’re too degraded for visual identification. The increasingly sophisticated use and analysis of ancient DNA now allows researchers to track the development and distribution of domesticated animals and crops in great detail.

Archaeologists have also used mass spectrometry, a technique involving gas ions, to pinpoint which species were cooked together based on the presence of biomolecules such as lipids. Stable isotopes of carbon and nitrogen from animal bones and seeds give insight into where and how plants and animals were managed – allowing us to more fully sketch out ancient foodwebs from soil conditions to human consumption. Strontium isotopes in human and animal bones, meanwhile, allow us to identify migrations across a single organism’s lifetime, revealing more and earlier long-distance interconnections than previously imagined. Radiocarbon dating was already possible in the 1950s – but recent improvements that have reduced sample sizes and error margins allow us to build fine-grained chronologies and directly date individual crops.

With all these fresh data, it’s now possible to tell a much richer, more diverse story about the gradual evolutions and dispersals of early agriculture. By 6,000 years ago, the British Isles were being transformed by an imported collection of crops, weeds and livestock that had originated millennia earlier in the Near East. Similarly, millet, rice and pigs from central China had been spread as far as Thailand by 4,000 years ago, and began transforming much of the region’s tropical woodland to agricultural fields. New stories are constantly emerging too – including that sorghum, a grain crop, was domesticated in the savannahs of eastern Sudan more than 5,000 years ago, before the arrival of domesticated sheep or goats in that area. Once combined with Near Eastern sheep, goats and cattle, agropastoralism spread rapidly throughout most of sub-Saharan Africa by 2,000 years ago.

Advances in the study of plant silica micro-fossils (phytoliths) have helped trace banana cultivation from the Island of New Guinea more than 7,000 years ago – from where it spread through Island Southeast Asia, and eventually across the Indian Ocean to Africa, more than a millennium before Vasco da Gama navigated from Africa to India. These techniques have also revealed unforeseen agricultural origins – such as the forgotten cereal, browntop millet. It was the first staple crop of South India, before it was largely replaced by crops such as sorghum that were translocated from Africa. Many people might be surprised to learn that the early farming tradition in the Mississippi basin relied on pitseed goosefoot, erect knotweed and marsh elder some 3,000-4,000 years ago, long before maize agriculture arrived in the American Midwest.

Archaeologists don’t just study materials painstakingly uncovered in excavations. They also examine landscapes, patterns of settlement, and the built infrastructure of past societies to get a sense of the accumulated changes that humans have made to our environments. They have developed a repertoire of techniques that allow them to study the traces of ancient people on scales much larger than an individual site: from simply walking and documenting the density of broken pottery on the ground, to examining satellite imagery, using lidar (light and laser) and drones to build 3D models, even searching for subsurface magnetic anomalies to plot out the walls of buried cities.

There was usually a long continuum of exploitation, translocation and management of ecosystems

As a result, new revelations about our deep past are constantly emerging. Recent discoveries in southwestern Amazonia showed that people were cultivating squash and manioc more than 10,000 years ago, and maize only a few thousand years later. They did so living in an engineered landscape consisting of thousands of artificial forested islands, within a seasonally flooded savannah.

Some of the most stunning discoveries have come from the application of lidar around Maya cities, buried underneath the tropical canopy in Central America. Lasers can penetrate this canopy to define the shapes of mounds, plazas, ceremonial platforms and long causeways that were previously indistinguishable from the topography of the jungle. A recent example in Mexico pushed back the time period for monumental construction to what we used to consider the very beginning of Maya civilisation – 3,000 years ago – and suggests the monuments were more widespread than previously believed.

These transitions were not linear or absolute. It’s now clear that there was usually a long continuum of exploitation, translocation and management of plants, animals, landforms and ecosystems well before (and often after) domestication occurred. This makes it harder to draw solid lines between hunter-gatherer and farmer societies, or between societies who practised different subsistence strategies. Over archaeological timescales spanning hundreds to thousands of years, land use can be thought of instead as a tapestry of ever-evolving anthroecosystems with higher or lower degrees of transformation – more or less human-shaped, or ‘domesticated’ environments.

In 2003, the climatologist William Ruddiman introduced the ‘early anthropogenic hypothesis’: the idea that agricultural land use began warming Earth’s climate thousands of years ago. While some aspects of this early global climate change remain unsettled among scientists, there’s strong consensus that land-use change was the greatest driver of global climate change until the 1950s, and remains a major driver of climate change today. As a result, global maps of historical changes in land use, and their effects on vegetation cover, soils and greenhouse gas emissions, are a critical component of all contemporary models for forecasting Earth’s future climate.

Deforestation, tilling the land and other agricultural practices alter regional and global climate because they release greenhouse gases from vegetation and soils, as well as altering the exchange of heat and moisture across Earth. These effects reverse when land is abandoned and vegetation recovers or is restored. Early changes in agricultural land use therefore have major implications in understanding climate changes of the past, present and future.

The main global map of historical land use deployed in climate models is HYDE (the History Database of the Global Environment), combining contemporary and historical patterns of land use and population across the planet over the past 12,000 years. Despite this huge span of space and time, with notable exceptions, HYDE is based largely on historical census data that go back to 1960, mostly from Europe.

HYDE’s creator, a collaborator in ArchaeoGLOBE, has long requested help from historians, scientists and archaeologists to build a stronger empirical basis for HYDE’s global maps – especially for the deep past, where data are especially lacking. The data needed to improve the HYDE database exist, but reside in a format that’s difficult to access – the expert knowledge of archaeologists working in sites and regions around the world. The problem is that no single archaeologist has the breadth or time-depth of knowledge required.

Archaeologists typically study individual regions and time periods, and have only background knowledge on wider areas. Research methods and terminology also aren’t standardised worldwide, making syntheses difficult, rare and subjective. To construct a comprehensive global database of past land use, you need to gather information from hundreds of regional specialists and collate it, allowing this mosaic of individual studies to emerge as a single picture. This was exactly what we did for ArchaeoGLOBE.

Earth’s terrestrial ecology was already largely transformed by hunter-gatherers, farmers and pastoralists

In 2018, we surveyed more than 1,300 archaeologists around the world, and synthesised their responses into ArchaeoGLOBE. The format of our questionnaire was based on 10 time-slices from history (from 10,000 years ago, roughly the beginning of agriculture, to 1850 CE, the industrial era in Europe); 146 geographic regions; four levels of land-use prevalence; and five land-use categories (foraging/hunting/gathering/fishing; pastoralism; extensive agriculture; intensive agriculture; urbanism).

We ended up receiving 711 regional assessments from 255 individual archaeologists – resulting in a globally complete, if uneven, map of archaeological knowledge. After synthesis and careful analysis, our results (along with 117 other co-authors) were published in 2019 in Science. We also made all our data and analysis available online, at every stage of the research process – even before we had finished collecting it – in an effort to stimulate the culture of open knowledge-sharing in archaeology as a discipline.

The resulting data-trove allows researchers to compare land-use systems over time and in different regions, as well as to aggregate their cumulative, global impacts at different points over the past 10,000 years. When we compared ArchaeoGLOBE results with HYDE, we found that archaeological assessments showed much earlier and more widespread agricultural land use than HYDE suggested – and, therefore, more intensive land use than had been factored into climate change assessments. Indeed, the beginnings of intensive agriculture in ArchaeoGLOBE were earlier than HYDE’s across more than half of Earth’s current agricultural regions, often by 1,000 years or more.

By 3,000 years ago, Earth’s terrestrial ecology was already largely transformed by hunter-gatherers, farmers and pastoralists – with more than half of regions assessed engaged in significant levels of agriculture or pastoralism. For example, the Kopaic Basin in the Greek region of Boeotia was drained and converted from wetland to agricultural land in the 13th century BCE. This plain – roughly 1,500 hectares (15 sq km) in size – surrounded by steep limestone hills, had been a large, shallow lake since the end of the last Ice Age. Late Bronze Age residents of the area, members of what we call the Mycenaean culture, constructed a hydraulic infrastructural system on a massive scale to drain the wetland and claim it for agriculture. They channelised rivers, dug drainage canals, built long dikes and expanded natural sinkholes to direct the water off what would have been nutrient-rich soil. Eventually, when the Mycenaean civilisation collapsed at the end of the Bronze Age, the basin flooded again and returned to its previous wetland state. Legend has it that Heracles filled in the sinkholes as revenge against a local king. The area was not successfully drained again until the 20th century.

These examples highlight a general trend we found that agriculture and pastoralism gradually replaced foraging-hunting-gathering around the world. But the data also show that there were reversals and different subsistence economies, from foraging to farming, operating in parallel in some places. Moreover, agriculture and pastoralism are not the only practices that transform environments. Hunter-gatherer land use was already widespread across the globe (82 per cent of regions) by 10,000 years ago. Through the selective harvest and translocation of favoured species, hunting (sometimes to extinction) and the use of fire to dramatically alter landscapes, most of the terrestrial biosphere was already significantly influenced by human activities, even before the domestication of plants and animals.

ArchaeoGLOBE is both a cause and a consequence of a dramatic change in perspective about how early land use produced long-term global environmental change. Archaeological knowledge is increasingly becoming a crucial instrument for understanding humanity’s cumulative effect on ecology and the Earth system, including global changes in climate and biodiversity. As a discipline, the mindset of archaeology stands in contrast to earlier perspectives grounded in the natural sciences, which have long emphasised a dichotomy between humans and nature.

In the ‘pristine myth’ paradigm from the natural sciences, as the geographer William Denevan called it, human societies are recent destroyers, or at the very least disturbers, of a mostly pristine natural world. Denevan was reacting against the portrayal of pre-1492 America as an untouched paradise, and he used the substantial evidence of indigenous landscape modification to argue that the human presence was perhaps more visible in 1492 than 1750. Recent popular conceptions of the Anthropocene risk making a similar mistake, drawing a thin bright line at 1950 and describing what comes after as a new, modern form of ecological disaster. Human changes to the environment are cumulative and were substantial at different scales throughout our history. The deep trajectory of land use revealed by ArchaeoGLOBE runs counter to the idea of pinpointing a single catalytic moment that fundamentally changed the relationship between humanity and the Earth system.

The pristine myth also accounts for why places without contemporary intensive land use are often dubbed ‘wilderness’ – such as areas of the Americas depopulated by the great post-Columbian die-off. Such interpretations, perpetuated by scientists, have long supported colonial narratives in which indigenous hunter-gatherer and even agricultural lands are portrayed as unused and ripe for productive use by colonial settlers.

The notion of a pristine Earth also pervaded the thinking of early conservationists in the United States such as John Muir. They were intent on preserving what they saw as the nobility of nature from a mob of lesser natural life, and also those eager to manage wilderness areas to maintain the trophy animals they enjoyed hunting. For example, the governor of California violently forced Indigenous peoples out of Yosemite Valley in the 19th century, making way for wilderness conservation. These ideas went hand-in-hand with a white supremacist view of humanity that cast immigrants and the poor as a type of invasive species. It was not a great leap of theorising to move from a notion of pristine nature to seeing much of humanity as the opposite – a contaminated, marring mass. In both realms, the human and the natural, the object was to exclude undesirable people to preserve bastions of the unspoilt world. These extreme expressions of a dichotomous view of nature and society are possible only by ignoring the growing evidence of long-term human changes to Earth’s ecology – humans were, and are still, essential components of most ‘natural’ ecosystems.

A clear-eyed appreciation for the deep entanglement of the human and natural worlds is vital

Humans have continually altered biodiversity on many scales. We have changed the local mix of species, their ranges, habitats and niches for thousands of years. Long before agriculture, selective human predation of many non-domesticated species shaped their evolutionary course. Even the relatively small hunter-gatherer populations of the late Pleistocene were capable of negatively affecting animal populations – driving many megafauna and island species extinct or to the point of extinction. But there have also been widespread social and ecological adaptations to these changes: human management can even increase biodiversity of landscapes and can sustain these increases for thousands of years. For example, pastoralism might have helped defer climate-driven aridification of the Sahara, maintaining mixed forests and grassland ecosystems in the region for centuries.

This recognition should cause us to rethink what ‘nature’ and ‘wilderness’ really are. If by ‘nature’ we mean something divorced from or untouched by humans, there’s almost nowhere on Earth where such conditions exist, or have existed for thousands of years. The same can be said of Earth’s climate. If early agricultural land use began warming our climate thousands of years ago, as the early anthropogenic hypothesis suggests, it implies that no ‘natural’ climate has existed for millennia.

A clear-eyed appreciation for the deep entanglement of the human and natural worlds is vital if we are to grapple with the unprecedented ecological challenges of our times. Naively romanticising a pristine Earth, on the other hand, will hold us back. Grasping that nature is inextricably linked with human societies is fundamental to the worldview of many Indigenous cultures – but it remains a novel and often controversial perspective within the natural sciences. Thankfully, it’s now gaining prominence within conservation circles, where it’s shifting attitudes about how to enable sustainable and resilient stewardship of land and ecosystems.

Viewing humans and nature as entwined doesn’t mean that we should shrug our shoulders at current climatic trends, unchecked deforestation, accelerating extinction rates or widespread industrial waste. Indeed, archaeology supplies numerous examples of societal and ecosystem collapse: a warning of what happens if we ignore the consequences of human-caused environmental change.

But ecological crises are not inevitable. Humans have long maintained sustainable environments by adapting and transforming their societies. As our work demonstrates, humans have shaped the ecology of this planet for thousands of years, and continue to shape it.

We live at a unique time in history, in which our awareness of our role in changing the planet is increasing at the precise moment when we’re causing it to change at an alarming rate. It’s ironic that technological advances are simultaneously accelerating both global environmental change and our ability to understand humans’ role in shaping life on Earth. Ultimately, though, a deeper appreciation of how the Earth’s environments are connected to human cultural values helps us make better decisions – and also places the responsibility for the planet’s future squarely on our shoulders.

Original essay here

Mads Ejsing mae@ifs.ku.dk

Volume 71, Issue 1

https://doi.org/10.1177/00380261221106905

Abstract

Since its origin in the natural sciences in the early 2000s, the concept of the Anthropocene has spread far and wide. Following the concept’s journey away from the natural sciences, where it was invented to designate the advent of a new geological epoch, and into the social and human sciences, its meaning has opened up to many different interpretations. This article examines three competing theoretical narratives about the Anthropocene, which have gained particular traction within social and political theory in recent years: The ‘good’ Anthropocene promoted by ecomodernists. The ‘bad’ Anthropocene, or so-called Capitalocene, critiqued by eco-Marxists. And, lastly, the ‘uncanny’ Anthropocene envisioned by new materialists. These three stories differ not only in their interpretation of the Anthropocene, they also engender notably different political responses. Echoing the insights of new materialists such as Jane Bennett, Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway, the article argues that we cannot rely on a single grand narrative of the Anthropocene today. What is needed, instead, is the proliferation of a multiplicity of different Anthropocene stories: situated, troubling and more-than-human stories that seek to displace idiosyncratic notions of the autonomous human subject so that we might begin to see what else is there.

Introduction

The arrival of the Anthropocene – this new geological epoch in which ‘humanity’ has become a planetary force of its own – entails a captivating story. But what kind of story is it? A tale of increased human powers? A tragedy of human fallibility? Or something else entirely? In this article I introduce three different stories of the Anthropocene that have gained increasing interest within social and political theory in recent years: The ‘good’ Anthropocene promoted by the so-called ecomodernists, the ‘bad’ Anthropocene critiqued by the eco-Marxists, and, finally, the ‘uncanny’ Anthropocene envisioned by new materialists. I retrace each of these stories as they unfold in the works of some of the most influential proponents within each tradition, and pay specific attention to the way in which each story answers questions such as: What are the origins of the Anthropocene and who are its main actors? What kinds of problems does the Anthropocene pose, and what political responses are required to solve those problems?

While all three stories entail valuable lessons for living in the Anthropocene, I argue that the new materialist story of the Anthropocene is preferable to its two alternatives. There are several reasons for this, including the need to pay renewed attention to the more-than-human entanglements of the climatic and ecological crises of the Anthropocene, as well as the recognition that these crises cannot be reduced to either a crisis of technology or politics, but go deeper, all the way to the cultural, even spiritual. In this article, however, I emphasize another argument in favor of the new materialist story: its ability to account and hold space open for what one might call ‘ontological multiplicity’, rather than insisting on the universality of a single grand story of the Anthropocene. As the anthropologist Anna Tsing and others have suggested, the Anthropocene is not a new, universally shared global condition, but more like a ‘patchwork’ of multiple, different, and differing localities that do not scale neatly into a unified global whole (Tsing, 2015; Tsing et al., 2019). The argument is not that all grand narratives of the Anthropocene are entirely false, but that they are at best partly true, that they pertain only or mostly to certain localities, and that they must therefore be supplemented with – and decentered by – a rush of smaller, more situated, and open-ended stories of multispecies survival on a damaged planet.

In what follows, I begin by briefly tracking the origin of the concept of the Anthropocene from its initial inception in the geological sciences and its first entry into parts of the social sciences, such as anthropology and social geography, all the way to its current arrival at the forefront of debates about climate change and ecology within social and political theory. In the three sections that follow, I develop each of the three narratives about the Anthropocene – the modernist, the Marxist, and the new materialist – on their own account, pointing out both their theoretical origins and their sociological reproduction in the landscape of climate politics today, before offering a critical commentary. Lastly, in the final section, I develop my argument for embracing the new materialist story, by insisting that it is best viewed as a sort of meta-narrative calling for multiple, situated, and open-ended stories that seek to uproot dominant discourses of the Anthropocene today.

An origin story: From geology to the human and social sciences

Coined as part of a discussion about geological periodization within the natural sciences in the early 2000s, the concept of the Anthropocene has since proliferated across the social and human sciences, and even outside the walls of academia into art, music, and dance.¹ The scholar often credited with bringing the concept into social science is the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty. In his now seminal article ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’ from 2009, Chakrabarty argued that the advent of the Anthropocene rearranges the age-old distinction between ‘human’ and ‘natural’ history, and that because humanity has become a geological force of its own, the histories of society and nature have become inextricably meshed (Chakrabarty, 2009).

In the last decade, the Anthropocene concept’s journey into the social sciences and humanities have helped open up new theoretical avenues for thinking about the new epochal condition, with numerous books, anthologies, and research articles now centering around the concept (Altvater et al., 2016; Davies, 2016; Hamilton et al., 2015; Purdy, 2015; Schlosberg, 2014; Scranton, 2015; Tsing et al., 2017). Despite the concept’s prolificacy, however, it remains highly contested within the social sciences, particular in the disciplines of anthropology and social geography, where it has been criticized for being both too male, too Western, and too white (see Grusin, 2017; Todd, 2015; Whyte, 2018; Yusoff, 2018). These issues continue to divide the ongoing academic debates about the Anthropocene, and a number of alternative concepts have been introduced, including neologisms such as the Capitalocene, the Chthulucene, the Planthropocene and many more. Nevertheless, the concept of the Anthropocene, and its alternatives, has come to anchor many of the theoretical debates about the present and future of climate change and the ongoing ecological crises.

In this journal, too, discussions around the Anthropocene have been connected to issues ranging from how failed ‘techno-fixes’ and colonial histories become entangled with the spread of new pathogens and other hard-to-live-with lifeforms (Giraud et al., 2019); the rise of a new type of geopolitics that shifts its focus to the management of the Earth system as a whole (Clark, 2014); to a critical engagement with appeals to ‘sustainable consumption’ as a way of addressing the challenges associated with the Anthropocene (Evans, 2019). Closest to the aims of this article is the contribution by Blok and Jensen from 2019, where they argue that the Anthropocene ‘event’ requires a new kind of social theory, one that draws on a tradition of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and entails slowing down and paying ‘immanent attention to the politics of varied matters as they unfold across the whole ecology of practices’ (Blok & Jensen, 2019, p. 1208).²

While sympathetic to Blok and Jensen’s philosophical project, this article seeks to build on and expand their arguments by turning ‘slow’ and ‘immanent’ attention to how competing conceptions of the Anthropocene prefigure different visions for climate politics today. More specifically, the article addresses three competing narratives of the Anthropocene that have gained particular attention in the last decade: The ‘good’ Anthropocene proposed by the ecomodernists, the ‘bad’ Anthropocene critiqued by the eco-Marxists, and the ‘uncanny’ Anthropocene envisioned by the new materialists. Each of these visions entails different interpretations of the current moment, proposes different future trajectories, and depends on different underlying onto-epistomological worldviews. By attending more carefully to each of these world-making projects, we learn something not only about the Anthropocene concept, but also about how the different interpretations of the current moment come to inform and shape politics.

Modernism and the ‘good’ Anthropocene

The most widespread approach to climate politics among political leaders in Western democracies today is undoubtedly the one informed by a modernist view of the Anthropocene. In many ways, this modernist view stands on the shoulders of the scientific understandings of the Anthropocene that came out of the natural sciences in the early 2000s. Here is the Anthropocene, as it was first described by atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and fresh water biologist Eugene Stoermer in their scientific newsletter from 2000, who are often credited with coining the concept:

Considering . . . major and still growing impacts of human activities on earth and atmosphere, and at all, including global, scales, it seems to us more than appropriate to emphasize the central role of mankind in geology and ecology by proposing to use the term ‘anthropocene’ for the current geological epoch. (Crutzen & Stoermer, 2000, p. 17)

On this view, the concept of the Anthropocene has become relevant today because of an increase in human powers: the unprecedented ability of humanity to reshape the contours of this planet has reached a level that now requires the introduction of a new geological epoch. Crutzen and other leading earth scientists have later suggested that because of this new Anthropocene condition, and the ecological crises it entails, it is time for humankind to own up to its new role as a geological force and become ‘stewards’ of the planet (Steffen et al., 2011).

This scientific understanding of the Anthropocene, and the responsibility it puts on humankind, was brought into a more explicitly social and political register in an Ecomodernist Manifesto from 2015.³ Here, a group of 18 scientists, journalists, and environmentalists affiliated with the American think tank The Breakthrough Institute developed their political blueprint for how to achieve a ‘good, or even great’ Anthropocene (The Breakthrough Institute, 2015, p. 6).⁴ Interestingly, the manifesto is highly optimistic about the current outlook. The backdrop to this optimism is a selective history of continued economic growth and human flourishing that have taken place over the past two centuries: Global living standards have gone up and life expectancy has more than doubled, while individual economic and political liberties have spread across the world and are, as the manifesto puts it, ‘today largely accepted as universal values’ (The Breakthrough Institute, 2015, p. 8).

According to the ecomodernists, the achievement of a ‘good, or even great’ Anthropocene hinges on human efforts to ‘liberate the environment from the economy’, or what the ecomodernists call decoupling (The Breakthrough Institute, 2015, p. 18). A successful example of decoupling is the increase in agricultural productivity from the mid-17th century to the 19th century, which reduced the amount of land needed to grow crops and food for an average person by half. There are several other emergent processes of such decoupling taking place today, including stagnating population growth, increasing urbanization, and decreasing resource intensity. Each of these developments are likely to reduce the total human impact on the environment; but they will have to be assisted and accelerated by technological innovations. Rising to the climatic and ecological challenges of the Anthropocene is ultimately a question of increased technological progress. As the authors of the manifesto write: ‘Absent profound technological change there is no credible path to meaningful climate mitigation’ (The Breakthrough Institute, 2015, p. 21).

Here lies a central element of the ecomodernist story: averting the dangers of climate change hinges not only on a decoupling of human from nature, but also on an increased technological control over nature. The creation of a ‘good’ Anthropocene, it turns out, depends on our ability to effectively intervene in and control natural ecosystems. Mark Lynas, who is an environmental journalist and co-author of the manifesto, describes it the following way in his book from 2011: ‘playing God (in the sense of being intelligent designers) at a planetary level is essential if creation is not to be irreparably damaged or even destroyed’ (Lynas, 2011). It is the increased powers and influence of human beings that have brought the planet into the current mess, and it is now up to humanity to use its powers to bring it back on track again.

This story of near-divine human powers is deeply entangled with contemporary attempts to address climate change through so-called geoengineering, which refers to ‘intentional large-scale manipulation of the environment, particularly manipulation that is intended to reduce undesired anthropogenic climate change’ (Keith, 2000, p. 245). Another of the manifesto’s 18 authors, Harvard professor in applied physics David V. Keith, is the founder and executive chairman of the Canadian company Carbon Engineering, which works to develop and commercialize Carbon Capture and Storage technologies that can remove CO₂ from the atmosphere in order to reduce global warming. These technologies, while still not fully developed, remain only a subset of a much larger set of geoengineering ‘solutions’ that vary significantly in terms of technological complexity, scope and impact.

At one end of the continuum are relatively low-tech and simple technologies, such as reforestation and regreening of dry lands. The mitigating effects of such technologies are not insignificant, but they remain at best supporting measures in a more holistic approach (Boysen et al., 2017). At the other end of the continuum, however, are much more drastic, far-reaching, and risky technologies that have the potential to bring about radical changes to earthly ecosystems. One of the most popular types of high-risk, high-impact geoengineering technologies is Solar Radiation Management (SRM), which entails manipulating the amount of sunlight that enters the atmosphere in an attempt to reduce global warming. Scientific debates about SRM first gained traction in 2006 when atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen published an article on the potentials of Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI). SAI involves spraying sulfate aerosols into the upper atmosphere in an attempt to block out sunlight and thereby reduce global temperatures, similarly to what happens in the event of large volcano eruptions (Crutzen, 2006b).

In his book, A Case for Climate Engineering from 2013, Keith makes a distinctly ecomodernist case for SAI: injecting sulfuric acid particles into the upper atmosphere is not only possible but also ‘cheap and technically easy’, he writes, making it an ideal geoengineering solution for ecomodernists who insist on the inseparability of economic growth and climate mitigation. It is a technology that could be up and running in ‘a few years for the price of a Hollywood blockbuster’ (Keith & Chasman, 2013, p. ix). But the questions remains: Should it? Keith ends up conveying a firm ‘yes’ to this question when measured against the dangers of maintaining the status quo. There is ‘no reasonable doubt’, he writes, that it could be used as an efficient geoengineering measure to significantly slow down global warming and reduce its most severe impacts over the coming decades (Keith & Chasman, 2013, pp. 8–10).

While the jury is still out on these technologies – both in terms of their desirability and long-term effects⁵ – geoengineering proposals remain a site of hope for many ecomodernists. This hope is sustained, in part, by an underlying understanding of the Anthropocene as a story of increased human powers. As the opening lines of the manifesto goes: ‘To say that the Earth is a human planet becomes truer every day’ (The Breakthrough Institute, 2015, p. 6). In the ecomodernist Anthropocene, it is humanity, as a species, that has created the current mess, and it is now up to humanity – with its world-altering powers – to ensure a good, or even great, Anthropocene, even if it requires becoming miniature Gods.

There are several reasons to be skeptical of this ecomodernist story, which include its emphasis on sustained economic growth as a precondition for ‘good’ Anthropocene, as well as its naïve optimism in technological interventions. But in order to see just how deep the problems with the ecomodernist worldview go, we might as well turn to the next story of the Anthropocene, the one promoted by the eco-Marxists.

Eco-Marxism and the ‘bad’ Anthropocene

On the surface, the ecomodernist and eco-Marxist stories of the Anthropocene could hardly be more at odds. Where the ecomodernists see climate change and global warming as challenges to be solved within existing political and economic systems, through decoupling and technological innovation, the eco-Marxists argue that any feasible solution to these crises require a fundamental break with those same systems. The eco-Marxist tradition has a long intellectual history, but in recent decades it is in particular thinkers like John Bellamy Foster, and his theories of a ‘metabolic rift’, that have helped bring eco-Marxist thinking back onto the forefront of social and political theory (Foster, 1999, 2000). To see how this eco-Marxist tradition has tried to come to terms with the concept of the Anthropocene, more specifically, we are going to turn to another prominent figure within contemporary eco-Marxists circles, namely the professor of human ecology Andreas Malm.

In his book Fossil Capital from 2016, Malm lays out a straightforward eco-Marxist account of the Anthropocene.⁶ In contrast to the ecomodernists, the main ecological problem today is not the unintended aggregated consequences of humanity at large, but the systematic effects of what he calls the ‘fossil economy’: a socio-ecological structure ‘of self-sustaining growth predicated on the growing consumptions of fossil fuels’ (Malm, 2016, p. 4). Malm locates the historical origins of this fossil economy in the British Industrial Revolution and the invention of the steam engine in the late 18th century. While the steam engine itself did not itself cause global warming, the introduction and dissemination of the steam engine, and the fossil economy more generally, helped consolidate new social and economic relations of power that made a small capitalist elite increasingly powerful at the expense of all the rest of humanity. The first step in addressing the challenges associated with the Anthropocene, therefore, is tracing the human origins of these power relations so that we might identify ‘at least a hypothetical possibility of changing course’ (Malm, 2016, p. 19).

Malm’s historical account of the fossil economy goes like this: Up until the invention of the steam engine, the British economy had relied primarily on water power, but the arrival of the steam engine, and the shift from water power to coal, created several advantages for owners of private capital. First, coal could be commodified, stocked, and circulated in the marketplace in ways that the flow of a river could not. It did not require the same laborsome management schemes like shared access to a communal river, and unlike the river, it was spatially and temporally mobile, allowing employers to move freely to areas with the most readily accessible and profitable labor pool. Moreover, the introduction of the steam engine provided an important benefit to capital owners: it could impel a machine, making employers less dependent on labor and insulating them from the resistance of their workers. As Malm writes: ‘The struggle against labour called for machinery, which called for steam power, which called for coal’ (Malm, 2016, p. 222). The combination of these factors drove capital owners in late 18th century Britain to adopt the steam engine, thereby putting the world on the path towards fossil fuel combustion, greenhouse gasses, and global warming we are still on today.

With this historical account in place, we can begin to understand Malm’s broader claims about the Anthropocene, and his objections to the Anthropocene narrative promoted by the ecomodernists. It is not, after all, ‘humanity’ that initiated the fossil economy, and it is not all of humanity that bears the responsibility for global warming. In fact, it was a ‘tiny minority’, a small ‘all-male, all-white’ class of British capitalists in the late 18th century, who installed the steam engine and ushered in the fossil economy (Malm, 2016, p. 267). Even today, it remains a tiny subset of humanity that emits the majority of the world’s greenhouse gasses: at the start of the 21st century, ‘the poorest 45 percent of humanity generated 7 percent of current CO2 emissions, while the richest 7 percent produced 50 percent’, and a single US citizen ‘emitted as much as upwards of 500 citizens of Ethiopia, Chad, Afghanistan, Mali, Cambodia, Burundi’ (Malm, 2016, p. 268). One of the core issues with the narrative promoted by ecomodernists, therefore, is that it denies the differentiated responsibilities within humanity (Malm & Hornborg, 2014) .

What is the eco-Marxist alternative? This question is addressed head on by Malm in his book The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World from 2018. Here, Malm leaves behind the more historical approach of Fossil Capital and engages in an explicitly philosophical and normative project. The book is, in his own words, an attempt to lay out a ‘conceptual map’ that can help guide revolutionary climate action and resistance (Malm, 2018, pp. 16–18). In order to do this, he develops what he calls a historical materialist approach to climate change that forefronts unequal social and economic powers among humans beings (Malm, 2018, pp. 161–163). The purpose of such an approach is to highlight the fundamental antagonism that exists today between the ultra-rich capitalist elites and everyone else. In a world where ‘the richest 1 percent have a carbon footprint some 175 times that of the poorest 10 percent’, we simply ‘cannot afford not to draw lines of separation’ (Malm, 2018, p. 189).

A social theory suited for the Anthropocene, then, must work to attenuate the division that exists between the capitalist elites and everyone else, and push that antagonism towards a radical polarization. Only then can there remain any hope of promoting radical political action and contribute to a revolutionary ecological politics that seeks to liberate both nature and humans from the destructions of fossil capitalism. There might still be a slim chance to avoid worst-case scenarios, but even that window is rapidly closing. Current trajectories of climate change are undeniably apocalyptic – why one must ‘dare to feel the panic’ and then use that panic as a catalyst for radical action (Malm, 2018, p. 226). In the end, the arrival of the Anthropocene and its ecological crises leave us with a straightforward choice, according to Malm: ‘commit to the most militant unwavering opposition to this system, or sit watching as it all goes down the drain’ (Malm, 2018, p. 226).

An alternative version of this eco-Marxist story of the Anthropocene can be found in Jason W. Moore’s book Capitalism in the Web of Life from 2015. While the primary target of critique here remains fossil capitalism, Moore insists (contra Malm) that capitalism is best understood as ‘a way of organizing nature’ rather than merely a social or economic system (Moore, 2015, p. 2). The ecological history of capitalism is, Moore argues, a history of ongoing appropriation and transformation of natural environments into capital value. Global capitalism has survived and thrived only by materially transforming its environments, and ceaselessly producing what Moore calls ‘cheap natures’: cheap labor-power, cheap food, cheap energy, and cheap raw materials. Capitalism owes its success to the material and extra-economical appropriation and primitive accumulation of those cheap natures, which have taken place, recurrently, since the colonial expansions of the long 16th century. The problem confronting capitalist societies today, and the reason behind the current crises, is that it is becoming ‘increasingly difficult to get nature – of any kind – to work harder’ (Moore, 2015, p. 13). Faced with the intertwined challenges of agricultural stagnation, antibiotic resistance, productivity slowdown, biodiversity collapse, rising commodity prices, and – above all – global warming, fossil capitalism is coming up against its own biophysical limits. In fact, Moore finds the internal contradictions of capitalism today so profound that he considers the continued survival of the system impossible and predicts that ‘capitalism will give way to another model . . . over the next century’ (Moore, 2015, p. 294).

Moore’s world-ecological approach remains highly contentious within contemporary Marxist circles, both because of its dissolution of any clear-cut distinctions between society and nature and because of its optimism about the inevitable breakdown of fossil capitalism. Andreas Malm has called Moore’s work ‘unbridled hybridism in Marxist garb’ (Malm, 2018, p. 181), and John Bellamy Foster said in an interview that Moore’s work has ‘moved to the other side, and now stands opposed to the ecosocialist movement and socialism (even radicalism) as a whole’ (Angus & Foster, 2016). This makes Moore’s story all the more interesting here, because it reveals the existence of ongoing intellectual struggles over what is the ‘right’ eco-Marxist story of the Anthropocene, and reminds us that there might not be one single narrative.

Nevertheless, the story told by Malm remains the dominant eco-Marxist view of the Anthropocene. As we have seen, it is a story that works directly against the modernist one: where the ecomodernists argue for technological fixes and seek to defend existing political systems including its liberal worldview, eco-Marxists like Malm aim to overturn the system and subvert capitalist systems through revolutionary political action. Despite their overt differences, however, the two stories share an underlying similarity: the eco-Marxist story of the Anthropocene is, too, a story of increased human powers, even if the increase in powers is ascribed not to humanity as a whole, but to a subset of humanity, the capitalist elites who have power over everyone (and everything) else. In contrast to the ecomodernist story, there is nothing good or hopeful about this new epochal condition. In fact, the Anthropocene and its ecological crises represent the inevitable and inherently bad outcome of a fundamentally destructive capitalist system. Still, the eco-Marxist story of the Anthropocene remains a distinctly human-centered story, populated solely by human protagonists and antagonists: a small group of capitalist elites, not humanity as such, have brought us into this mess, and now it is up to the rest of us, the 99%, to rise up against the rule of the few, overthrow fossil capitalism, and thereby avert the imminent dangers of an impending climate catastrophe.

Like with the ecomodernist story, there are several reasons to be skeptical of the eco-Marxist story of the Anthropocene. Among these reasons are its preoccupation with capitalism as the single all-encompassing ill of the current moment, as well as its attribution of the origin of the Anthropocene to the early-industrial Great Britain, which not only reflects an underlying Eurocentrism, but also misrecognizes that the way in which many of the social and economic dynamics of the current crises goes much further back, and have their roots, at least in the long 16th century and the ongoing histories of settler colonialism. But the problems with the eco-Marxist vision of the Anthropocene cuts even deeper than that, and in order to see this, we now turn to the new materialist vision of the Anthropocene.

New materialism and the ‘uncanny’ Anthropocene

The third story of the Anthropocene, the one told by the new materialists, begins where the eco-Marxists put down their brakes: by upsetting the distinction between society and nature, between humans and the rest of the world. ⁷ We can get a better sense of this by turning to one of the central texts within the new materialist tradition, namely Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things from 2010, where she lays out the kind of horizontal ontology that underpins the new materialist story of the Anthropocene. Bennett and other contemporary new materialists are not the first, nor the only, to make the claim that the human and the more-than-human world are deeply intertwined, and that forms of agency are distributed across the artificial division between society and nature. As several authors have noted, such insights draw on and have come out of a long tradition of indigenous and non-Western thinking that goes back centuries, even millennia, as well as more recent developments within deep ecology and feminist thought during the second half of the 20th century.⁸ The ‘new’ in new materialism does not suggest unprecedented, it suggests merely a different kind of materialism, one that can be contrasted with earlier forms of materialism such as ‘historical’ materialism, and one that takes seriously the active and agentive capacities of matter (Coole & Frost, 2010).

The starting point for the new materialist story is that the current ecological crises do not simply constitute a technological problem (as suggested by the ecomodernists) or even a political problem (as suggested by the eco-Marxists) but reflect a deeper cultural and existential problem. In Vibrant Matter, Bennett argues that the dominant Western worldview, which envisions matter as inert and passive, provides philosophical fuel for human ‘fantasies of conquest and consumption’ that see the natural world as a resource to be extracted and thereby contribute to the current destruction of the conditions of life on the planet (Bennett, 2010, p. ix). What is needed today, therefore, is not just a new kind of politics, but also a philosophical and sensorial reorientation that challenges the ontological separation that divides the world into passive matter and active human beings – the hope being that such a reorientation can help cultivate new desires and sensibilities that will enable wiser and more ethical relations between humans and the more-than-human world (Bennett, 2010, p. 4).

Bennett embarks on this project through a series of theoretical reflections that she refers to as speculative ‘onto-story’ rather ontology, thereby emphasizing the conditions of contestation and unknowability inherent to ontological argumentation (Bennett, 2010, p. 4). Drawing on thinkers such as Spinoza and Deleuze, Bennett’s onto-story is one where deep down everything in the world is made of ‘the same quirky stuff, the same building blocks’ that ‘we might call . . . atoms, quarks, particles streams or matter-energy’ (Bennett, 2010, p. xi). These building blocks exist on a ‘turbulent, immanent field in which various and variable materialities collide, congeal, morph, evolve and disintegrate’ making up what we, humans, perceive to be the world. Everything in the world – not only human beings, but worms, rocks, and metallic substances too – exhibit an intrinsic drive to persist and exert different degrees of thing-power that can ‘affect other bodies, enhancing or weakening their power’ – they entail what Bennett calls a vitality intrinsic to matter itself (Bennett, 2010, pp. 2–3).

This intrinsic vitality of all things can be difficult to discern in our daily lives, where most material things appear fixed and lifeless, but only because their rate of movement and change ‘proceeds at a speed or a level below the threshold of human discernment’ (Bennett, 2010, p. 58). When viewed from the perspective of other temporalities, such as biological evolution or deep geological time, seemingly stable things like minerals and mountains quickly begin to move, transform, and become active shapers of the world, while the seemingly active powers of ‘human beings, with their much-lauded capacity for self-directed action’ begin to look less significant and much more passive (Bennett, 2010, p. 11). Paying attention to these and other temporalities, therefore, can help challenge the conventional belief that human beings are the only, or even the most important, agents operating in an otherwise passive material world.

From an ecological perspective, human beings are but ‘a particularly rich and complex collection of materials’ that exist ontologically, materially, and practically within a world that is always-already inhabited by a myriad of other human and non-human forces (Bennett, 2010, p. 11). The powers of human beings work with and against a multiplicity of other kinds of non-human agencies that co-shape and often outstrip our human capacities to change the world, even if they do so at different scales and temporalities. By understanding human beings in this way, as operating on the same ontological plane as the rest of the world, the new materialist story displaces human-centric worldviews that insist on distinguishing humanity from nature, by placing humans ‘at the ontological center or hierarchical apex’ (Bennett, 2010, p. 11). This displacement of humans is not meant to not deny the importance of the ‘often awesome, awful powers’ of human beings (Bennett, 2010, p. 10). It does, however, entail an explicit and active attempt to ‘distribute value more generously’ by inspiring ‘a greater sense of the extent to which all bodies are kin, in the sense of inextricably enmeshed in dense networks of relations’ (Bennett, 2010, p. 13).

This emphasis on relationality and ontological entanglement is particularly important to the new materialist story. As Bennett writes with echoes from Spinoza, it is a material and ontological condition of any existing body that it ‘depends on the collaboration, cooperation, or interactive interference of many bodies and forces’ and therefore ‘never really acts alone’ (Bennett, 2010, p. 21). Everything in this world exists and becomes what it is only through its intricate and overlapping relations and interconnections with numerous other things and beings. To capture this ontological entanglement, Bennett borrows the concept of an ‘assemblage’ from Deleuze and Guattari: assemblages are lively and diverse constellations of ‘vibrant materials of all sorts’ that are ‘not governed by any central head’ (Bennett, 2010, p. 24). A human body, for example, is a complex assemblage of cells, microbes, flesh, water molecules, desires, thoughts, and so on, all of which play a role in determining its capacities. At the same time, human bodies are part of numerous other complex assemblages, say as a workplace or political community, which are in turn comprised of numerous other human and non-human entities. Even the Earth itself, as suggested by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis in the early 1970s with their ‘Gaia hypothesis’, can be understood as a particularly complex kind of assemblage, made up of a multiplicity of other complex assemblages that constantly encroach upon and develop in relation to other assemblages (Lovelock & Margulis, 1974).

In a series of lectures called Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climate Regime from 2017, the French philosopher Bruno Latour invokes this assemblatic concept of Gaia to tell his version of a new materialist story of the Anthropocene. When moving from the Holocene to the Anthropocene – from an image of a stable globe to the lively assemblages of Gaia – a post-Enlightenment cosmology that posits a bifurcation between humans and nature on the grounds that humans have escaped from or can be distinguished from nature, no longer rings true. For Latour therefore, as for Bennett, rising to the challenges of the Anthropocene requires not only a new politics, but also a whole new cosmology, or what he calls a ‘counter-Copernican revolution’ (Latour, 2017, p. 61).

As the crisis of the Anthropocene suggest, Gaia has starting to ‘treat us as enemies’ (Latour, 2017, p. 281). Throughout most of the Holocene, natural environments remained largely indifferent to the miniscule effects of dispersed human activities, but today they are ‘no longer indifferent to our actions’ (p. 281). Therefore, in order to avoid waging an outright war against the planet, human beings of the Anthropocene must learn how to respond to Gaia with care, and how to free themselves of the illusions of infinite growth or infinite progress that brought about this mess in the first place. Only by accepting the finitude of human existence and coming back down to earth, by becoming ‘earthbound’ as Latour writes, can humans begin to find and learn new ways of living within the boundaries on this planet (Latour, 2017, p. 244).

Ultimately, for Latour, the ecological crises of the Anthropocene have brought humans into a new condition of Schmittean war between friend and enemy; a war between those still ‘living in the epoch of the Holocene’, who have not yet realized that the Earth is moving beneath their feet, and those living as ‘Earthbound in the Anthropocene’, who have realized that in order to survive, they will have to come down to Earth and learn how to sense and respond to nature, to Gaia (Latour, 2017, p. 261). While the simplicity of Latour’s story of a war between good and evil might seem appealing, his story of the Anthropocene is challenged by the eco-feminist philosopher Donna Haraway in her book Staying with the Trouble from 2016. Instead of stories of war and conflict, which draw up new lines of friend and enemy, Haraway invites us to pursue what she calls ‘tentacular’ thinking: ‘a method of tracing, of following a thread in the dark, in a dangerous true tale of adventure, where who lives and who dies and how might become clearer for the cultivating of multispecies justice’ (Haraway, 2016, p. 3).

With a playful curiosity, Haraway follows such tentacular threads into many places, finding valuable lessons in everything from art-activism projects in Southern California that cultivate interspecies trust between humans and pigeons, to the chthonic (under)worlds of Gorgons in Greek myths, the frontiers of biological research on symbiogenesis, and the science-art worldings of a computer game informed by experiences of native Inupat people in Alaska. If this sounds a little troubling and a bit speculative, it is because it is. While invoking new concepts and modes of storytelling that rely on speculation, fabulation, and science fiction, Haraway intentionally pushes against the limits of existing scientific epistemologies. For Haraway, this speculative work is required, because the Anthropocene has left us in the dark without bearings, and with no stories or concepts to rely on other than those of the outdated dualisms nature/culture, organism/environment, subject/object, which we can no longer think with (Haraway, 2016, p. 30).

But think we must! So, we must learn to think differently, and when doing so it becomes immensely important who and what we think with. This is part of the reason why Haraway takes issue with the story of friends and enemies told by Latour, even if they otherwise share many sympathies. By enlisting Carl Schmitt as his thinking companion, Latour gets too caught up in a story of war that relies on masculine tropes of heroes, victory and defeat, with all of its antagonistic dualisms and apocalyptic futures (Haraway, 2016, pp. 42–43). Today what is needed instead, Haraway insists, is a different kind of stories: more situated, patient, and tentacular stories that extend their webs in many directions and include both Gorgons and spiders, corals and octopuses, to name just a few of Haraway’s protagonists. Stories that seek to world other worlds, new worlds that can help envision and prefigure a coming-into-being of multispecies justice.

As the title of her book suggests, Haraway urges us to stay with the trouble. She wants us to remain in the troubled, muddled waters of the present instead of returning to simplified grand narratives or leaping into uncertain futures. Staying with the trouble means acknowledging the complex, entangled, often destructive histories that have brought about and still exist within the present moment – such as the histories of settler colonialism that still have their creepy tentacles all over the place today – without thereby succumbing to the belief that it is either impossible or already ‘too late’ to think and act differently (Haraway, 2016, p. 56). It means recognizing, and here she agrees with Latour, that there is still time for new and different stories, but these stories cannot rely on grand narratives of either apocalypse or salvation; neither can they rely on illusions of a return to a stable past, which never existed to begin with, as has become popular in ethno-nationalist movements today. We must, Haraway argues, give up hope in airy promises of solutions that project us into the future or wish for a return to the past, and instead begin to look for muddled hope in the troubled present. Then, and only then, might we begin learning to live with others on this damaged planet.

In the end, the new materialist stories of the Anthropocene told by Bennett, Latour, and Haraway leave us with a decidedly different view of the world than the one conveyed in the human-centered stories of ecomodernism and eco-Marxism. It is one in which the main actors are no longer human beings alone, but a much wider range of actors that include oceans, rivers, metals, corals, spiders, mythical creatures, and Gaia. It is a story in which the identification of the current crises shifts away from a sole focus on CO₂ emissions or fossil capitalism to a much broader philosophical and cultural problem that is deeply connected to the ways in which we, as humans beings, think about and act in relation to the more-than-human inhabitants of this world.

For new materialists, the Anthropocene condition entails an uncanny double movement.⁹ On the one hand, the Anthropocene signals an increase in the world-making powers of (some) human beings over others, including many natural environments. On the other hand, the ecological crises and subsequent lack of human responses simultaneously demonstrate the limits of human powers and reminds us that the Earth is inhabited by many entities whose powers outstrip humans many times over. To new materialists, the crisis of the Anthropocene is an invitation to challenge the way we currently think about and perform the relationship between society and nature, between the human and the non-human, and to start paying more attention to the dependencies, entanglements, and resonances that cut across and interrupt those distinctions. Reformulating the problem in this way both changes and expands the range of politics that must be engaged in. Politics-as-usual, technological solutions, or even taking down capitalism is no longer going to cut it. What is needed is a whole new way of understanding of ourselves in the world, a whole new cosmology.

Telling other stories: Less than one, more than many

Both the ecomodernist and the eco-Marxist story rely on a dualist ontology that partitions the world into two realms with active and agential human beings on one side and passive law-abiding natural environments on the other. They remain couched within explicitly human and sociocentric perspectives that overestimate the world-making capacities of human beings and downplay our dependence on, as well as the active powers of, the myriad of non-human forces that upset our bids for control. These post-Enlightenment stories render the world of non-human matter passive and inert, in turn making us less attentive and responsive to its active and agential (thing-)powers. By telling stories of the Anthropocene that feature almost exclusively human beings and a natural environment that exists ‘out there’, as something that must be protected by and for the sake of human beings, all the other myriad of beings and things that inhabit and shape our world remains out of sight, out of sense.

The new materialist story explicitly challenges the human-centrism of these other stories. Not because human beings have ceased to matter in the Anthropocene. In fact, human activities matter more than ever, not only from a human perspective, but from an ecological perspective too. As Haraway writes,

. . . the doings of situated, actual human beings matter. It matters with which ways of living and dying we cast our lot rather than others. It matters not just to human beings, but also to those many critters across Taxa which and whom we have subjected to exterminations, extinction, genocides, and prospects of futurelessness. (Haraway, 2016, p. 55)

But even from a purely self-interested human perspective, the only way to survive in this world is to survive in collaboration with other things and beings, whether it is the microbes in our guts, the pollinators in vital ecosystems, or the oxygen in the troposphere. Of course, we can never completely escape our distinctly human perspectives; we meet and experience the world through our embodiment as human beings with a specific temporality and spatiality. Neither are there any reasons to resist our own humanity, nor to reject the special ethical commitments we have towards human others because of our perspectival position (Bennett, 2010, p. 104).

However, we can begin to cultivate a new and more ecological human sensibility towards a more-than-human world, and one way to do so is by telling other stories. Stories that exercise our blunted capacities for caring for and responding to multispecies others (Haraway, 2016, p. 29). If storytelling is a practice of thinking that exercises capacities for caring, the stories we tell both represent and reconfigure what we find worth caring for and are capable of attending to. Thus, in order to start recognizing more-than-human others, and to become attentive and capable of responding to them, we will have to become better at telling less human-centered stories (Haraway 2016; Tsing, 2015; Van Dooren, 2014). Stories that seeks to displace, or at least decenter, the idiosyncratic Western understanding of the human individual, so that we might begin to see what else is there, what else could be there.

The new materialist insistence on paying attention to more-than-human assemblages and their agentive capacities offers an important counter-narrative to the anthropocentrism of the ecomodernist and eco-Marxist stories. But – and this is important – if the new materialist story of the Anthropocene becomes just another grand narrative, which positions itself as the only story relevant for understanding the current condition, we have not come very far. As Haraway suggests in Staying with the Trouble, the stories we tell about the climate and ecological crises are constantly on the verge of becoming ‘too large’, making us unable to see and sense outside its limits. This goes for the new materialist story too. If the increasing popularity of theories of new materialism within universities in recent years means that it gets to position itself as a new hegemonic position, and (against its initial promises) renders us inattentive to, for example, the potential benefits of new technology, the destructive dynamics of capitalist patterns of economic production and consumption, or the situated struggles of marginalized communities, it must certainly be subjected to critique.

Making room for other stories about the Anthropocene requires affirming multiplicity and creative experimentation, rather than insisting on a single overarching narrative. But this is exactly part of the reason why the new materialist story is preferable to the ecomodernist and eco-Marxist alternatives: it recognizes that there is no single story to be told today, and seeks to keep space open for a complex and interlinked world of social and ecological multiplicity. In this sense, it is perhaps better thought of as a sort of meta-narrative – a carrier bag to use a metaphor by writer Ursula Le Guin (1996) – that makes room for other stories, rather than aspiring to become the full story. As a result, the new materialist story of the Anthropocene is not a complete narrative, but one that can be supplemented with, populated by, situated stories about the many dispersed and ongoing efforts to promote ecological sustainability and multispecies justice, unfolding in communities around the world today.

In a playful reversal of anthropologist Marilyn Strathern’s original saying, we might say with Anna Tsing and her co-authors that the Anthropocene is ‘Less Than One, More than Many’ (Swanson et al., 2015). It is less than one, because it does not signify a new unified global condition; and it is more than many because its patchwork of different, situated, and increasingly fragile Anthropocene realities, human as well as non-human, constantly exceeds our capacities for describing them in generalized terms (Tsing, 2015; Tsing et al., 2019). Therefore, if the concept of the Anthropocene is to continue to foster insightful theoretical insights about the ongoing ecological and climatic crises, new studies of the Anthropocene will have to move beyond the abstract analyses of the new epoch, and towards more concrete analyses of specific lived Anthropocene realities, which can help to challenge and pluralize the grand narratives that posit the Anthropocene as a shared global epochal condition (Ejsing, 2021; Ejsing 2020).

To put it differently, not everyone is living in the same Anthropocene. That might sound like an admission of political defeat: How can we begin to push back against climate change and global warming, if we do not even agree upon the premises, if we do not even agree what world we are living in? But that question reverses the real political challenge: it assumes that if only all agreed that we were, for example, living in the Anthropocene envisioned by the eco-Marxists, then we could finally begin to do politics from the same conceptual vantage point. But politics have never started with that kind of common ground. Politics are about creating, or to use Latour’s term ‘composing’ common ground where it does not already exist. It will not do to presuppose a new shared global condition where it does not already exist, whether that condition is described in terms of a single ‘humanity’ or a single enemy ‘capitalism’. Instead, there is an urgent need to act despite ontological uncertainty and with a recognition of situated difference. Doing politics in the Anthropocene, therefore, will have to begin ‘in the middle of things’, in the complex and muddled realities from which politics arise. Only from here can we begin to compose new and more ethical multispecies relations for the Anthropocene.

Footnotes

1.

To read more about how the concept was first introduced and popularized in the natural sciences, see for example Crutzen, 2002, 2006a; Crutzen & Stoermer, 2000; Zalasiewicz et al., 2008.GO TO FOOTNOTE

2.

Blok and Jensen distinguish their own STS-inspired approach from that of the ‘new materialism’ of thinkers like Nigel Clark and others. I suspect, however, that they would find themselves in sympathy with much, if not most, of the more encompassing vision of a new materialist Anthropocene that I lay out in this article.GO TO FOOTNOTE

3.

While the 2015 Ecomodernist Manifesto has gained a lot of attention since its publication, for other contributions to an ecomodernist worldview see also Brand, 2010; Lynas, 2011; Nordhaus & Shellenberger, 2007; Pielke, 2010.GO TO FOOTNOTE

4.

Among the 18 co-authors of the manifesto are prominent figures from environmentalist circles, such as Steward Brand, the controversial author of Whole Earth Catalog, and Ted Nordhaus, who is recurrently cited for his proposition that postponing action of global warming is a cost-effective strategy.GO TO FOOTNOTE

5.

A critical engagement with these kinds of high-risk geoengineering projects can be found in Hamilton, 2014.GO TO FOOTNOTE

6.

It should be noted here that many eco-Marxists oppose the concept of the Anthropocene itself. Andreas Malm and others have suggested, instead, the name ‘Capitalocene’, which emphasizes the decisive and detrimental role played by capitalism in bringing about this new geological epoch and its ecological crises. However, I stick to the more general usage of Anthropocene here. For a more thorough discussion on these matters see the volume Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism edited by Jason W. Moore.GO TO FOOTNOTE

7.

I use ‘new’ materialism here in a rather capacious sense that encompasses both Bennett’s materialism, which draws on a vitalist tradition, and Latour’s materialism, which comes out of Science and Technology Studies and Actor-Network-Theory. While there are notable differences between the two traditions, what connects them here is both their difference to earlier forms of ‘historical’ and ‘economic’ materialism, as well as their insistence on extending agentive capacities across human–non-human distinctions. See also ‘Can We Get Our Materialism Back, Please?’ (Latour, 2007).GO TO FOOTNOTE

8.

Theories of new materialism are sometimes critiqued for silencing, or at least neglecting, the importance of earlier theoretical contributions, in particular by indigenous and non-Western thought, or even extending colonial imaginaries. See for example Sherilyn MacGregor’s recent article ‘Making Matter Great Again’ in Environmental Politics, where she writes that ‘we did not need Bennett to write Vibrant Matter to help us see the non-binary enmeshment of materiality and values’ when several traditions of thought were already making similar arguments (MacGregor, 2021, p. 50). Critiques like these are important, and suggest a real need for new materialists to acknowledge the connections to prior work and thinking, both in terms of academic recognition and citation practices, while fostering new alliances across lines of difference that do not exacerbate existing inequalities and hierarchies of privilege (see also Todd, 2015).GO TO FOOTNOTE

9.

I am using the word ‘uncanny’ here in the sense suggested by Nils Bubandt, to capture the feeling that something which previously seemed safe and familiar, such as life on this Earth, suddenly takes on a new and unhomely character (Bubandt, 2018).GO TO FOOTNOTE

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Crunching the numbers, researchers found that turning the western U.S. into an electrified net zero hub is technically feasible, affordable—and perhaps even environmentally sustainable.

By Warren Cornwall

Original article here

The push to power more of the modern world with electricity—and to get those electrons without burning fossil fuels—isn’t entirely green.

Vows to steer down a path to “net zero” carbon emissions around the middle of this century have become a centerpiece of climate policies for companies, states and entire countries. Such moves are considered critical if the world is going to keep temperature increases well below 2°C, a threshold commonly cited as a point when the effects of global warming become severe.

But kicking the fossil fuel addiction comes with an environmental price of its own, especially if we want to hang onto the cell phones, plane trips, car commutes and 24/7 easy electricity that are hallmarks of modern life in the developed world. Copper, aluminum, lithium and rare earth metals, to name a few, need to be mined. And then there’s the question of where to put all those solar panels, wind turbines and switchgrass fields.

Now, a group of scientists working in the western U.S. have crafted a road map for getting the region to net zero while minimizing the environmental footprint. The upshot: It’s going to take a lot of land blanketed with solar panels and wind turbines. But careful planning could shrink the footprint on sensitive habitats and valuable farmland by half.

Grace Wu, a University of California, Santa Barbara environmental scientist who helped lead the research, summed up her view of the likelihood of western states reaching net zero this way: “It’s going to be hard, but it’s not impossible.”

Reconfiguring an entire energy system is no easy task. The North American electrical grid alone has been described as the world’s largest machine. Add in all the ways energy today is produced (wind, solar, geothermal, nuclear, gas, coal, oil, etc.) and used (transportation, manufacturing, server farms, watching Netflix, writing this story, etc.). The number of variables is staggering.

Wu was part of a team of scientists with expertise in all things energy who joined forces to try to come up with detailed, realistic scenarios for how the 11 states in the western U.S., which are joined together by electrical transmission lines, could shift their energy systems to net zero carbon emissions by 2050. They also wanted to see what the footprint would be on land and in the ocean. Members included people from a handful of California universities, consulting firms, energy companies and the environmental group The Nature Conservancy.

To find answers, the group embarked on a binge of data-crunching and computer modeling. They used environmental and land-use data to map where power generators such as wind farms could be built. They modeled routes and costs for power lines to get electricity from where it’s made to where it’s used. They plugged all of this into a program called RIO, designed to create different scenarios that would meet future energy needs. They then calculated how these results overlaid on the region’s farmland, important wildlife habitat and relatively undamaged landscapes.

The magnitude of the impact is boggling. By 2050, turning the western U.S. into a highly electrified net zero mecca run largely on renewable energy would take as much as 4.5 times more total electricity than a system built without worrying about carbon emissions. That’s largely because of the shift from fossil-fuel burning devices (cars, stoves, furnaces) to ones running on electricity. Demand for transmission systems to move that electricity would be as much as 65% greater. And the amount of land and ocean space dedicated to energy could be as much as 11 times greater than if carbon weren’t a concern. All told, the region’s energy footprint would be between 70,000 and 143,000 square kilometers bigger with the net zero push, the scientists reported this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The larger number represents enough solar panels, power lines, wind turbines and bioenergy crops to cover nearly half the state of New Mexico.

“The scale, pace, and land use requirements of the energy infrastructure build-out required to achieve net-zero economy-wide emissions are unprecedented,” the researchers wrote. “Yet, if this transition is adequately planned, it is technically feasible, affordable, and environmentally sustainable.”

The final footprint, however, depends on the details. Shifting more quickly to electricity would reduce the amount of land used, because it would mean less reliance on producing liquid biofuel from crops, the most land-intensive part of this energy equation. Likewise, adopting measures to steer power production away from more ecologically or agriculturally valuable land would shift power production to less land-intensive uses, the scientists found. For example, more conservation-minded policies would translate into a 25% increase in solar farms, while wind farms would shrink by 26%.

Emphasizing land conservation does add a 3% cost to overall energy production, which amounts to $7.8 billion in annual costs in 2050, the study showed.

While these scenarios help clarify the tradeoffs of choosing different paths forward, they illustrate how daunting it will be to make good on the net zero promises. It also raises questions about whether society and governments are ready for it. Between now and 2050, construction of low-carbon energy infrastructure would need to advance at two to three times current rates.

The biggest roadblocks could come with some of the least glamorous hardware: transmission lines. It can take a decade to build high-voltage transmission lines to ferry electricity across multiple states – for example from Wyoming windfarms to California, said Wu. That’s in part due to the challenges of getting permits for such projects. The study found that even with more strict land conservation policies, getting to net zero would take more than 10,000 kilometers of new high-voltage lines. “I worry more about actually permitting transmission than I do about permitting wind and solar farms,” she said

Wu, et. al. “Minimizing habitat conflicts in meeting net-zero energy targets in the western United States.” Jan. 19, 2023. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Image: ©Andy Tucker via Flickr

Karen O’Brien 

Ambio volume 50, pages 1793–1797 (2021)

Abstract

Research on global environmental change has transformed the way that we think about human-environment relationships and Earth system processes. The four Ambio articles highlighted in this 50th Anniversary Issue have influenced the cultural narrative on environmental change, highlighting concepts such as “resilience,” “coupled human and natural systems”, and the “Anthropocene.” In this peer response, I argue that global change research is still paying insufficient attention to how to deliberately transform systems and cultures to avoid the risks that science itself has warned us about. In particular, global change research has failed to adequately integrate the subjective realm of meaning making into both understanding and action. Although this has been an implicit subtext in global change research, it is time to fully integrate research from the social sciences and environmental humanities.

“Welcome to the Anthropocene.” The cover photo of the May 28, 2011 edition of The Economist portrayed the Earth as a technical structure covered by riveted steel plates in dull blue colors. The accompanying story informed readers that “Humans have changed the way the world works. Now they have to change the way they think about it, too” (The Economist 2011). This was a remarkable statement from a magazine considered an icon of neoliberal economic policy, and it seemed to suggest that an awareness of human-induced global environmental change had finally penetrated the world of business and economics. Ten years later, is there any real evidence of a fundamental shift in thinking that moves beyond business as usual and towards an equitable and sustainable world?

Yes and no. How we think about the way that the world works has changed dramatically over the past decades. The years leading up to The Economist cover story saw an impressive amount of research on global environmental change that has transformed the way that we think about human-environment relationships and Earth system processes. The concept of the Anthropocene has contributed to a new way of describing the significant role of humans in shaping the Earth’s geology and ecology. Yet climate change, biodiversity loss, poverty, inequality, and other global problems are even more serious concerns today, and the timeframe for taking actions to meet international commitments is shrinking, increasing the risk of reaching “tipping points” and experiencing catastrophic losses (IPCC 2018; IPBES 2019). Business as usual has been proceeding at breakneck speed, interrupted only by the COVID-19 pandemic. This is an important moment to reflect on how conscious transformations to sustainability can be realized.

In this peer reflection, I start by acknowledging the contributions of global change research to a dynamic, interconnected view of the world. With specific reference to four key articles published in Ambio, it is clear that concepts such as “resilience,” “coupled human and natural systems,” and “the Anthropocene” represent important advances that have influenced both scientific and cultural narratives on environmental change. However, I would also argue that global change research is still paying insufficient attention to how to deliberately transform systems and cultures to avoid the risk of what Steffen et al. (2011, p. 14) describe as “the collapse of large segments of the human population or of globalised contemporary society as whole.” In particular, global change research has failed to adequately integrate the subjective realm of meaning making into both understanding and action. Not just meaning making in general, but the differences in and dynamics of meaning making, including how they relate to beliefs, values, agency, empowerment, creativity, emotions, and not the least, political action. A deeper approach recognizes the limits of what Berzonsky and Moser (2017, p. 16) refer to as the “’dominant social paradigm’ characterized by fragmentation, either/or thinking, an isolation of humans from nature, and a split of the material from the spiritual, the individual from community.” Without attention to the “deeper” human dimensions of global environmental change, it is likely that large-scale societal transformations will remain wishful thinking, rather than experienced realities.

The importance of meaning making has long been an implicit subtext within global change research. In fact, the realm of human thought and ideas, also referred to as the “noosphere,” has historically had a close relationship with understandings of ecology and geology (see Samson and Pitt 1999). However, even though this relationship has been recognized for over one hundred years, the dynamic aspects of meaning making have not been fully integrated into global change research, with exceptions such as research on climate change beliefs within cognitive psychology and on indigenous attitudes towards nature in anthropology and human geography. As an abstract representation of the subjective, interior world of individual and collective meaning making, the noosphere may be a useful starting point for inquiries into how humans relate to each other, to nature, and to the future. More important, it may provide insights into how this does (or does not) change over time and within different social and cultural contexts, such that we can better understand and promote rapid transformations to sustainability.

The four Ambio articles reviewed here include subtle yet significant references to the noosphere. For example, in “Resilience and Sustainable Development: Building Adaptive Capacity in a World of Transformations,” Folke et al. (2002, p. 437) called for “awareness of the need for a worldwide fundamental change in thinking and in practice of environmental management.” Emphasizing concepts of resilience and adaptive management, they highlighted the dynamic and non-linear nature of social-ecological change and the potential for irreversible regime shifts. They also considered the policy implications of resilience within the context of sustainable development, drawing attention to interrelationships between the biosphere and prosperous development of society, as well as the need for flexible and innovative collaboration. The article offered suggestions for how to operationalize sustainability, including by strengthening the perception of interdependence of humanity and nature and recognizing that “The outdated perception of humanity as decoupled from, and in control of, nature is an underlying cause of society’s vulnerability” (Folke et al. 2002, p. 438). This article touched on the relationship between thoughts and practices, which together with the call for a shift in perceptions, hints at the importance of meaning making, beliefs, and worldviews. This was important, as the paper summarized a report that fed into the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg.

In “Coupled Human and Natural Systems,” Liu et al. (2007) emphasized the complexity of organizational, spatial, and temporal relationships, and highlighted the ways that cumulative and evolving impacts of past interactions influence current and future conditions. In describing coupled human and natural systems (CHANS), they pointed to the global yet heterogeneous nature of spatial interactions and the time lags between human decisions and their environmental effects, all of which complicate understandings and management strategies. Unprecedented rapid changes and tighter couplings at multiple scales were presented as an interdisciplinary challenge that called for integrated tools and assessments to produce “more ‘usable’ knowledge for sustainable ecological and socioeconomic benefits” (Liu et al. 2007, p. 646). In reflecting on the implications for management, governance, and policy, Liu et al. (2007) recognized that hubris in human attitudes toward natural systems was an impediment for progress. At the same time, they acknowledged that humans are not sufficiently represented in ecological science. The paper thus indirectly recognized the importance of subjective attitudes and meaning making and the need for a larger role for the social sciences and humanities in global change research.

In the same issue of Ambio, the article by Steffen et al. (2007) on “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?” described a profound shift in human-nature relationships. Placing the understanding of coupled human and natural systems within a wider historical context, the paper stressed that humanity is pushing the Earth into a state of terra incognita. The authors drew attention to some of the worst-case scenarios, noting that prior to the Anthropocene, humans “did not have the numbers, social and economic organization, or technologies needed to equal or dominate the great forces of Nature in magnitude or rate” (Steffen et al. 2007, p. 615). With the onset of industrialization in the 19^th century, humans transformed the environment at a global scale, as evidenced by dramatic rises in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gas emissions. In describing The Great Acceleration that started in 1945, Steffen et al. (2007) noted that the intellectual, cultural, political, and legal context at the time paid little attention to the impacts on Earth System processes. To ensure sustainability of the planet, they emphasized the need for a more reflective approach to development, noting that “Humanity is, in one way or another, becoming a self-conscious, active agent in the operation of its own life support system” (Steffen et al. 2007, p. 619). The very idea that part of the system is becoming self-aware of its impact on the system suggested a shift in meaning-making, which is a reflection that resonates with some interpretations of the noosphere (Samson and Pitt 1999).

Finally, the article by Steffen et al. (2011) highlighted the potential for managing the global environment in a more sustainable manner, and called for a fundamental change in our relationship to the planet we inhabit. In “The Anthropocene: From Global Change to Planetary Stewardship,” the authors reiterated some of the historical drivers and indicators of the Anthropocene, and pointed to the importance of biodiversity in maintaining sustainable environmental conditions. Importantly, they stressed that “We are the first generation with the knowledge of how our activities influence the Earth System, and thus the first generation with the power and the responsibility to change our relationship with the planet” (Steffen et al. 2011, p. 759). This article too hinted that changing our relationship with the planet involves more than behavioral shifts; it involves a shift in meaning-making that is expressed through actions that replace exploitative or controlling systems with ones that reflect a mindset of interdependence and stewardship.

These four Ambio articles identified the need for transformative change, and thus can be considered foundations for today’s rapidly-growing literature on transformations to sustainability. For example, Folke et al. (2002, p. 437) recognized that “humans can transform ecosystems into more or less desirable conditions.” Steffen et al. (2007) concluded that a business-as-usual approach will be insufficient to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century, and Liu et al. (2007, p. 644) recognized that “traditional development strategies need to be altered, and transforming them into sustainable practices is urgent…”. Finally, Steffen et al. (2011, p. 753) sounded a warning against ‘‘fiddling at the edges’’ and acknowledge that “[m]ore transformational approaches may be required.” The transformative approaches described by Steffen et al. (2007) ranged from geo-engineering or the deliberate manipulation of Earth system processes to strategies to reduce or modify human influence by adopting a “Planetary Boundaries” approach. Yet geoengineering is widely considered a continuation of business as usual, in that it does nothing to challenge the current political, economic, or cultural systems that drive environmental change, nor the paradigms and practices that maintain them. This suggests a rather limited vision for transformative responses within the biophysical discourse on global environmental change (Leichenko and O’Brien 2019).

The articles have certainly helped to steer global change research in a more integrated and action-oriented direction. For example, Folke et al.’s (2002) focus on sudden and abrupt changes can be considered a precursor to research on planetary boundaries and tipping points, which is now being applied to the concept of social tipping points (Bentley et al. 2014; Milkoreit et al. 2018; Otto et al. 2020). Liu et al. (2007) called for more attention to emergent properties, reciprocal effects, nonlinearity, and surprises in management and planning. In discussing the increased scale and pace of human-nature interactions, they used the example of diseases such as SARS that spread much faster than earlier due to globalization processes. Despite these insights, the recent COVID-19 pandemic reveals a massive failure to integrate knowledge and action. Steffen et al. (2011) remind us that a failure to act introduces the possibility for collapse, or the uncontrolled decline of a society or civilization.

What these articles did not address was how deliberate transformations to sustainability come about, particularly how transformations in perceptions, meaning making, and relationships with nature actually can and do shift, and how such changes play out in the political sphere. Importantly, in recent years there has been a dramatic increase in the number of research programs, projects, and articles on transformations to sustainability. Most of these are located within the social sciences and environmental humanities, and draw attention to the importance of integrating more complex understandings of social systems and more nuanced interpretations of human relationships with the natural world. In Urgency in the Anthropocene, Lynch and Veland (2018, p. 1) contend that the notion of the Anthropocene belongs to a modern European mythology and its linear view of time, emphasizing that “our narration of causation and expectation fundamentally determines the preparation for, response to, and recovery from each perceived manifestation of anthropogenic global change.” For example, representation of the Anthropocene as a “rupture” or deviation from Holocene conditions can be contrasted with an interpretation that highlights the “entanglement” of humans and other beings and processes in the Earth system (Harrington 2020). Indeed, more and more researchers are focusing on how to transform these entangled relationships, paying attention to the role of mindsets, meaning making, imagination, and narratives (Göpel 2016; Milkoreit 2017; Hochachka 2019).

There are also many critical and emancipatory approaches in the social science that acknowledge the ways that social structures and institutions can limit or expand the potential for humans and non-human species to flourish in the Anthropocene (Wright 2013). For example, pointing to the need to go beyond a general focus on “megatrends” and “humanity,” Brand (2016, p. 515) emphasizes a political ecology perspective, where “[w]hat is being examined is not ‘the environment’, the ‘environmental space’, ‘planetary boundaries’, or even the overuse of resources, ecosystems and sinks. Of interest are rather the capitalist, imperial and patriarchal forms of the appropriation of nature: i.e., the forms in which such basic societal needs as food and housing, mobility and communications, and health and reproduction are satisfied.” This focus on power, politics, gender, colonization, global inequality, and interspecies relationships has led to alternative interpretations of the Anthropocene, introducing terms such as the Manthropocene, the Capitalocene and the Chthulucene (Gibson-Graham 2011; Castree 2015; Haraway 2016).

Returning to the “Welcome to the Anthropocene” article in The Economist, one cannot help but notice that the “world of transformations” described by Folke et al. (2002) translated into the idea that planetary resilience “will probably involve a few dramatic changes and a lot of fiddling” (The Economist 2011), or more specifically geoengineering and technical innovations. Hmm. It is clear that transformations to an equitable, just, and thriving world will require more than this. Perhaps the key to a sustainable future lies not in just working to change the way that “others” think about the world, but to be alert and wary of the potential for hubris in the science of global change. The imperative for transformative change demands reflexive, strategic, inclusive, and diverse responses; integrating the noosphere into understandings of Earth System processes may help us not only to make sense of the current crises, but also to transform them.

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O’Brien, K. Reflecting on the Anthropocene: The Call for Deeper Transformations. Ambio 50, 1793–1797 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-020-01468-9

Jochem Zwier & 

Vincent Blok 

Abstract

This paper offers a twofold ontological conceptualization of technology in the Anthropocene. On the one hand, we aim to show how the Anthropocene occasions an experience of our inescapable inclusion in the technological structuring of reality that Martin Heidegger associates with cybernetics. On the other hand, by confronting Heidegger’s thought on technology with Georges Bataille’s consideration of technological existence as economic and averted existence, we will criticize Heidegger’s account by arguing that notwithstanding its inescapable inclusion in cybernetics, technology in the Anthropocene itself fosters an experience of what remains excluded. We conclude by indicating how such an experience is relevant for contemporary philosophical investigation of technology.

And Earth, our blood–warm Earth, a shuddering prey

To that frigidity of brainless ray – George Meredith

Introduction

This paper offers a twofold ontological conceptualization of technology in the Anthropocene. On the one hand, we aim to show how the Anthropocene occasions an experience of our inescapable inclusion in the technological structuring of reality that Martin Heidegger associates with cybernetics. On the other hand, by confronting Heidegger’s thought on technology with Georges Bataille’s consideration of technological existence as economic and averted existence, we will argue that notwithstanding its inescapable inclusion in cybernetics, technology in the Anthropocene itself fosters an experience of what remains excluded. We conclude by indicating why such an experience is relevant for the contemporary philosophical investigation of technology.

To clarify what is at stake, we will address technology in terms of symmetry and asymmetry. In “The Anthropocene as Cybernetic Phenomenon” section, we begin by interpreting the Anthropocene as a cybernetic phenomenon in Heidegger’s sense. Technological existence is thereby rendered ontologically symmetric, meaning that our habitation of the Earth comes to be characterized by what we will discuss as a collective measure (sym–metry) of technological regulation. In “The Anthropocene and the Intrusion of Asymmetry” section, we consider the Anthropocene from an ecological perspective to articulate an asymmetry on the part of the anthropocenic Earth. Subsequently, the “Phenomenon and Asymmetry” section shows how this asymmetry comes to unsettle Heidegger’s ontological interpretation of symmetric cybernetics. Put briefly, this means that even though the Anthropocene concretely corresponds to Heidegger’s portrayal of the “cybernetic age,” it does not entail the therewith associated oblivion of being. Instead, we will develop a critique of Heidegger’s consideration of cybernetics by arguing that the peculiar interplay of technology and the Earth gives rise to a concrete experience of being as concealing-unconcealing. To investigate this experience, the “Bataille: Asymmetry and Technology” section introduces a Bataillean reading of technology that flanks but finally strays from Heidegger’s interpretation. Situating technology in Bataille’s thought on economy and waste allows for an articulation of technological existence as forgetfully diverting from what ontologically constitutes it. While such an articulation of technology resonates with Heidegger’s association of cybernetic technology and the oblivion of being, we submit that technology in the Anthropocene comes to be reminded of this forgetful diversion, notably due to the way it relates to the Earth via abundance and waste. We therefore conclude that in the Anthropocene, technology must be understood as ontologically forgetful, but not wholly oblivious, as it fosters—through the fumes of the technological waste named CO₂—a responsivity to what ontologically constitutes technological existence whilst remaining asymmetric to it. Finally, the “Conclusion: the Asymmetric Exposure” section indicates why such a twofold consideration of technology (as symmetric and asymmetric) is relevant for the philosophical questioning of technology in relation to our earthly ecology.

The Anthropocene as Cybernetic Phenomenon

In this section, we interpret the Anthropocene as a cybernetic phenomenon, thereby using Heidegger’s considerations of phenomenology and cybernetics as a guide.

The Anthropocene is commonly understood as the epoch in which the technological activity of industrialized humanity becomes the dominant factor shaping the Earth and its associated life-supporting systems (Steffen et al. 2007). Supplementing the Holocene, where the relatively warm climate was considered to be the critical geological factor (Crutzen 2002; Fagan 2004; Dumanoski 2009), the Anthropocene places anthropic technological activity in the center, thus marking the time in which “natural and human forces [are] intertwined, so that the fate of the one determines the fate of the other” (Zalasiewicz et al. 2010: 2231).

As Hamilton, Bonneuil, and Gemmene note, the concept of the Anthropocene is not isolated to the scientific fields of climate science, geology, and earth-system science, but moves beyond these fields insofar as it more generally “represents the ground-breaking attempt to think together earth processes, life, [and] human enterprise (…) into a totalizing framework” (Hamilton et al. 2015: 2). This convergence of human enterprise and other earthly processes is philosophically relevant because it renders them symmetric, meaning that both appear in the same register of geo-forces whose operation constitutes the earth-system. By implication, human rational thought is not merely considered to appear on Earth as a manifestation of something superlunary or transcendent, but primarily appears as Earth, which is to say as one of many earth-shaping geo-forces, albeit one of considerable magnitude (see Zwier and Blok 2017). The magnitude of the rational geo-force called humanity becomes particularly patent in its techno-industrial interlocking with other earthly processes, for instance the ones that engender fossil fuels (the residue of antecedent geo-forces such as organic life compressed via plate tectonics). By way of this interlocking of geo-forces, the human geo-force currently takes the stage as the dominant earth-shaping force amongst many (see Crutzen 2002; Steffen et al. 2007, 2011a, b).

The Anthropocenic symmetry between thought and other earthly processes is philosophically relevant because it suggests that theoretical thought can no longer assume an isolated perspective that merely observes the configuration of geo-forces as an object, but is itself always already implicated or included in this configuration. Such inclusivity prompts an interpretation of the Anthropocene as a phenomenon to be questioned phenomenologically.^Footnote1 Following the work of Martin Heidegger, a phenomenon never stands over against us as thing or object, but concerns the relation that we always already enact in our encounter with things (see Heidegger 2004; see Zwier et al. 2016). Heidegger famously exemplifies this relationality when he shows how a theoretical perspective on a hammer (considered as material object with particular weight, strength etc.) already enacts a specific relation by means of which the hammer can appear as a theoretical, “present-at-hand” object (Heidegger 2008: 93, 95). Such a theorizing relation is not universal but specific: in using a hammer, one does not encounter it as a theoretical object, but rather enacts a kind of relation by which the hammer appears “ready-to-hand” (2008: 95–102), meaning that it withdraws in favor of the project that is to be hammered out. Although we can relate to things in various ways, the crucial phenomenological point is that we are always already and inescapably included in a relation. Such inclusion is inescapable because of the following reason: although our way of encountering a hammer can itself become the object of analysis (as the above example illustrates), this can only be done by enacting a relation in which this particular encounter itself appears as theoretical object to be analyzed. This then means that we are always already included in a relation between being and thinking, whether this concerns the ‘embodied’ kind of thinking enacted in praxis (using a hammer) or a more ‘abstract’ theoretical thinking (studying the hammer as object, or analyzing ways of encountering a hammer). The phenomenon concerns this inclusive relation between being and thinking. It is thereby not itself situated on the ontic level of beings or objects that we find in front of us, but must be understood ontologically, as an inescapable structuring of our encounter with things. Now, the Anthropocene attests to a similar inescapable inclusivity, given how human (practical and theoretical) activity is here considered to be inevitably implicated in a play of geo-forces. This suggests that the Anthropocene can be understood as phenomenon (see Zwier and Blok 2017).

Questioning the phenomenon of the Anthropocene accordingly means questioning the character of its inclusive relationality. We propose to call this relationality cybernetic. This follows Heidegger’s interpretation of cybernetics as a “foundational” or “fundamental science [Grundwissenschaft]” (Heidegger 1972: 58).^Footnote2 For Heidegger, cybernetics is not one particular scientific discipline apropos a specific domain of objects at the ontic level of specific beings (technological, organic, social etc.), but is ontological in that it concerns the relation between being and thinking that already “defines and steers” (1972: 58, translation modified) the objective sciences, meaning that it structures the way in which objects are encountered and how propositions regarding such objects are made and evaluated. He calls this ontological relationality cybernetic because being and scientific thinking couple in an operative feedback-loop: in the same way that an anti-aircraft cannon constantly feeds-back information pertaining to the flightpath of an aircraft into its actuators (speed of rotation, angle of barrel etc.) to constitute an adaptive system, the sciences feed-back propositions, categories, hypotheses, and (experimental) results into a functioning whole, constantly adapting or discarding dysfunctional elements, for instance via a process of falsification (see Heidegger 2001: 91–92, 1972: 58–59). Our hypothesis is that the phenomenon of the Anthropocene involves such a cybernetic relation between being and thinking, whilst provoking a concrete experience of our inclusion in this cybernetic relationality. As such, we submit that the Anthropocene can be characterized as cybernetic phenomenon. To develop this hypothesis, we begin by analyzing both sides of the relation between being and thinking, which in turn sheds light on the phenomenological implications pertaining to this relation itself.

On the side of being, the anthropocenic objective sciences (most notably earth-system science) consider the being in question—the Earth—as earth-system. This system has a cybernetic character insofar as various functional elements (temperature, pH, chemical composition of the atmosphere, ecosystems, and notably human activity) couple in a feedback-loop which regulates the conditions of the planet understood as integral system. Steffen, Crutzen, and McNeill accordingly define the earth-system as

the suite of interacting physical, chemical and biological global-scale cycles (…) and energy fluxes that provide the life-support system for life at the surface of the planet. [A] critical feature is that forcings and feedbacks within the Earth System are as important as external drivers of change, such as the flux of energy from the sun. [The] Earth System includes humans, our societies, and our activities; thus, humans are not an outside force perturbing an otherwise natural system but rather an integral and interacting part of the Earth System itself. (Steffen et al. 2007: 615; see Hamilton 2016: 94)

The being called the earth system thus appears as a cybernetic system, which integrates human beings as one of its many regulatory elements. Be that as it may, this description of a particular cybernetic being does not yet lend credence to our hypothesis that the Anthropocene concerns a cybernetic relation between being and thinking in an ontological sense. We therefore turn to the side of thinking.

It is noteworthy that anthropocenic scientific thought is not merely about some cybernetic being called the earth-system and its dynamic configuration of geo-forces. Rather, scientific thought is itself already included in a cybernetic encounter with this cybernetic being, given how it is oriented towards regulation of the human habitat. Science has not only disclosed how the Anthropocene signals—most eminently and alarmingly via global warming—the advent of an earthly regime that may well be uninhabitable for humanity, but immediately responds to this by mobilizing scientific knowledge about the earth-system to ward off such a regime (see Hamilton et al. 2015: 4; Baskin 2015: 13; Clark 2011). Instances of this include Crutzen’s aim to “guide society towards environmentally sustainable management during the era of the Anthropocene” (2002: 23), the envisaged task to “steer nature’s course symbiotically” (Crutzen and Schwägerl 2011), or the general idea of “Planetary Stewardship” (Steffen et al. 2011a, b), whether via radical geo-engineering or other (perhaps more conservative) ways of technologically regulating the planet (see Lorimer 2016; see Zwier and Blok 2017; Lynas 2011). As Jeremy Baskin sums up:

In almost all of the major accounts of the concept it is assumed that [the Anthropocene] requires a trinity of techniques: clear management of the Earth and Earth-systems, guided by experts (and scientists/engineers in particular), using the most advanced technology possible (including large-scale technology). (2015: 20)

This regulative response to global warming indicates how scientific thought is not merely about the cybernetic being called the earth-system, but itself immediately and cybernetically feeds back into this system to regulate thermal parameters that are presently witnessed to drift towards fatal levels. Such a focus on regulation is not limited to eco-modernist programs of planetary engineering. For instance, the socio-ecological approach of “Resilience Thinking” (Walker and Salt 2006) is critical of a “command-and-control approach” (11) that tends to place human management outside the ecological system. At the same time, whilst explicitly acknowledging and including itself in the interlinking of social and natural systems (8), resilience thinking expressly considers such interlinking in terms of cybernetic regulation and feedback. This is evidenced by its basic concepts, where, for example, resilience itself is understood as “the ability of a system to absorb disturbance and still retain its basic function” (1), or where “thresholds” take account of how systems have “more than one kind of stable state … with different feedbacks between its component parts” (11).^Footnote3 Generally then, with regards to the relation between being and thinking, such emphasis on regulation and feedback makes clear that scientific thought not only encounters the earth-system as a cybernetic being or system at the ontic level, but that this encounter is itself already “defined and steered” by cybernetics at an ontological level.

Yet what is more, this cybernetic character is not limited to scientific thought vis-à-vis the earth-system, but equally envelops the mundane thinking that we enact in, for example, having a cup of coffee. Indeed, the phenomenon of the Anthropocene precisely and quite literally renders a cup of coffee mundane insofar as its earthly character becomes pronounced (ontologically, not aromatically). In the same way that we no longer can have routine conversations about the weather without having global warming intrude upon the conversation (Morton 2013: 99), neither can we have a cup of coffee that is not shadowed by its earthly trace, e.g., a carbon-footprint related to its production, shipping, brewing, etc., and which cannot be dissociated from a warming earth-system. Of course, this earthly character is not always obtrusive: we do not experience it when stopping by the coffee machine before rushing into a meeting. Yet when it does come to the fore—for instance when the emptied beaker made out of 100% biodegradable materials catches our eye during a tedious meeting^Footnote4—it not only reveals our preceding activity of drinking coffee as feeding back into the earth-system, but further makes clear that this feedback is unavoidable: opting for ecologically certified coffee that includes emission compensation precisely takes account of such feedback. The takeaway here is not some normative vilification of coffee, but a phenomenological indication of how the cybernetic character of the Anthropocene does not merely concern the relation between being and scientific thinking, but likewise envelops the relation between being and the mundane, everyday thinking involved in brewing, ordering, or drinking a cup of coffee.

In this way, the Anthropocene can be said to render Heidegger’s arguably rather abstract ontological interpretation of cybernetics concrete, as it manifests how we are inescapably included in a relationality that can be phenomenologically characterized in terms of cybernetic, regulative steering.^Footnote5 For Heidegger, cybernetics means that

The world-relations of humans and with them the collective societal existence of humans, are enclosed in the hegemonic domain of cybernetic science. (Heidegger 1983: 145)^Footnote6

In the Anthropocene, we can experience this “enclosure” in a concrete way insofar as we find ourselves part and parcel of a warming globe that must be regulated if it is to remain habitable. If the abovementioned coffee merely offers an easily overlooked glimpse, more blatant examples include starting the ignition of a car after refuelling (where feed-back into a thermally drifting earth-system increasingly becomes a burning concern), or proudly studying the yields of one’s rooftop solar array to record the “kg’s of CO₂-emissions saved”. The experience here is how, just as we cannot step outside our warming globe, neither can we escape relating to this globe as an earth-system needing to be regulated in one way or another. As such, we can say that the Anthropocene both concurs with Heidegger’s interpretation of cybernetics and concomitantly offers a concretisation of what he articulates as our being “enclosed” (Heidegger 1983: 145) in a cybernetic relationality.^Footnote7

The Anthropocene and the Intrusion of Asymmetry

The previous section took notice of what we can call the symmetry of the Anthropocene. Understood according to its colloquial meaning, such symmetry denotes a qualitative similarity, where humanity registers as one of many similar geo-forces that make up and shape the earth-system. Yet further, understood phenomenologically, this symmetry not only betokens the ontic domain of beings (such as geo-forces) but the ontological relation between being and thinking as well: if, as argued, the phenomenon of the Anthropocene implies that earthly beings (including ourselves as scientists, coffee drinkers, car refuelers, etc.) appear included in a cybernetic relationality, then this relationality is itself symmetric inasmuch as it is characterized by an inexorable—paraphrasing Heidegger: “enclosing”—collective measure, a sym-metry of regulative steering. Now, by foregrounding the Earth, the present section contrasts the symmetry of the Anthropocene by introducing an Earthly asymmetry.

Whatever one makes of it, the Anthropocene always obviously concerns the Earth. We proffer, however, that the above interpretation of the Anthropocene as cybernetic phenomenon engenders a specific, twofold understanding of the Earth, namely as symmetric oikos and asymmetric intrusion.

As to the first, we have argued that our current encounter with things takes place as Earth inasmuch as the regulative steering enacted by the geo-force called humanity inheres in an Earthly interplay of many symmetric geo-forces (notably including the interplay of geo-forces such as plate tectonics and organic life that engender fossil fuels on the one hand, and their technological, exploitative regulation by the human geo-force and its combustion engines on the other). Be that as it may, such symmetric encounters evidently take place on Earth. The latter can thereby be understood as the habitat or oikos that, as it were, provides the stage upon which the interplay of geo-forces unfolds. This oikos is symmetric in the ontic sense of housing a vast variety of symmetric geo-forces, but is also symmetric in an ontological sense that concerns the character of our habitation of this Earthly oikos, where being and thinking (whether scientific or mundane, see “The Anthropocene as Cybernetic Phenomenon” section) couple in a regulative feedback-loop and thus adhere to the collective measure (sym-metry) of cybernetic regulation.

Besides the Earth as symmetric oikos, however, the Anthropocene also involves an asymmetry between oikos and Earth. This comes into view as the flipside of symmetrically understanding humanity as a geo-force: while the current dominance of the anthropic geo-force may validate its very own epochal nameplate, it becomes equally evident that this dominance is not its own Munchhausen-like doing, but is conditioned by the Earth. Not only does our geo-forcefulness hinge on the Earth granting us access to its vast depot of fossil fuels, but the very existence of our now planetary oikos turns out to be contingently premised on the earth-system going through a (Holocenic-Anthropocenic) period of relative climatic stability (see Szersynski 2012: 168). And at this juncture, global warming makes its dreaded entrance, not only as the consequence of the infernal coupling of the anthropic geo-force and fossil fuels (see Clark and Yusoff 2014), but primarily as compelling a concrete experience of what earth-system science and geology have long since known objectively, namely that the Earthly stability that supports our oikos and which we take for granted, is no longer self-evidently granted, and turns out to be an exception to the rule of a deeply unstable, constantly fluctuating and capricious Earth (see Clark 2011; McGuire 2013; Zwier and Blok 2017). This then demonstrates how in the Anthropocene, the cybernetic regulation of our habitat not only belongs to the Earth (here understood as the symmetric oikos upon which the interplay of geo-forces such as humans and fossil-fuels transpires), but is conjointly pitted against the Earth insofar as we find it withdrawing its stable support. In correspondingly experiencing the necessity to regulate against such withdrawal by way of some form of technological regulation, we both encounter and counter the intrusion of an Earthly regime that transcends, exceeds, i.e., remains asymmetric to our oikos. In short, in the Anthropocene, we do not merely inhabit the Earth (as symmetric oikos), but in so doing (en)counter the intrusion of the asymmetric Earth.^Footnote8

This oiko-logical interpretation of the Anthropocene thus gives rise to a twofold consideration of the Earth as symmetric oikos and asymmetric intrusion. This consideration roots in what at first appears as a singularly ontic interpretation of a being called the Earth. It is open to question, however, whether the intrusion of the asymmetric Earth is limited to the ontic domain. The question that therefore follows concerns the implications of asymmetry for cybernetic symmetry.

Phenomenon and Asymmetry

In responding to the question raised at the end of the previous section, the hypothesis developed here is that the intrusion of asymmetry in the Anthropocene engenders a reorientation of Heidegger’s ontological interpretation of cybernetics. We submit that such a reorientation is significant for philosophy of technology, because it allows for a reconsideration of Heidegger’s identification of technology and the oblivion of being. To clarify this reorientation, it is fist necessary to elucidate two additional points of reference that orient Heidegger’s ontological interpretation of cybernetics (“Heidegger: Cybernetics and Oblivion” section), and subsequently confront these with the Anthropocene (“Cybernetics and the Anthropocene” section). Having already discussed the enclosure of cybernetics (“The Anthropocene as Cybernetic Phenomenon” section), we now turn to its unidirectionality and occlusion.

Heidegger: Cybernetics and Oblivion

In characterizing the relation between being and thinking, cybernetics structures the way in which beings are encountered, namely according to a collective measure, a sym-metry of regulation. For Heidegger, such structuring is unidirectional, meaning that our (technological) interactions with the world at the ontic level neither affect nor escape the ontological relationality in which they are always already included. We have heard Heidegger state that:

The world-relations of humans and with them the collective societal existence of humans, are enclosed in the hegemonic domain of cybernetic science. (Heidegger 1983: 145)

He further says of cybernetics that

[its] most expansive feedback-loop encompasses the interrelation of man and world (…) [and its] occlusion [Verschlossenheit] can never be disjointed by human beings (…) not by way and means of scientific-technical planning and making. (Heidegger 1983: 145–146)

On the one hand, these fragments indicate Heidegger’s unidirectional relating of being and beings. As a “foundational science” (Heidegger 1972: 58; see §1), cybernetics is not some generalization or categorisation that abstracts from the cybernetic beings encountered in the world (e.g., cybernetic systems, theories, or human operations), but is rather understood as the “hegemonic domain” that already “encloses” and “encompasses” every relation to the world and worldly beings. What is more, inasmuch as our encounter and interaction with the ontic world of beings, for instance our “scientific-technical planning and making,” is already “encompassed by” the ontological relation between being and thinking that structures this encounter, the ontic domain only responds to ontological cybernetics, whilst never reshaping or “disjointing” it. Put succinctly, ontological cybernetics structures the ontic world of beings, but never vice versa. We can refer to this the unidirectionality of Heidegger’s interpretation of cybernetics.^Footnote9

On the other hand, the previous quotations not only make clear how cybernetics is ontologically unidirectional and enclosing, but further indicate that this entails an occlusion [Verschlossenheit]. This occlusion is considered as an “occlusion vis-à-vis the destining [Geschick]” (Heidegger 1983: 146). Explained in phenomenological terms, such destining can be understood as the characterization of the ontological relationality in which we are always already included, and which structures the way in which we encounter things. For Heidegger, such structuring takes on different configurations throughout the “history of being” (Heidegger 1999) of the Western philosophical tradition. Where, for example, antique philosophy encountered a tree as a sublunary, perishable instance of a superlunary, eternal idea, and where medieval philosophy encountered the same tree as ens creatum in a divinely instituted order of things, today, in light of global warming, we encounter this tree cybernetically, as a carbon-source or carbon-sink to be regulated (see Zwier and Blok 2017).^Footnote10 Leaving aside further analysis of these “destinings” and their coherence, it presently suffices to emphasize how such destining belongs in what Heidegger calls the concealing-unconcealing of being (Heidegger 1998a). This means that in the emergence of a destining (unconcealment), the possibility for a different destining remains withdrawn (concealment).

Now, Heidegger considers cybernetics as an ontological destining in the above illustrated sense, but its “occlusion” entails that this destining itself is forgotten. This is to say that cybernetics is unquestioningly presupposed as status quo, and is not recognized as a particular structuring of reality or way of unconcealment belonging in the concealing-unconcealing of being. Accordingly, conveying both the meaning of “enclosed” as well as “being closed off from,” the cybernetic occlusion implies that while we are “enclosed” in the destining of cybernetics, we are concurrently “closed off from” perceiving cybernetics as a specific ontological destining.^Footnote11 The reason for this is that insofar as the relation between being and thinking is “defined and steered” by cybernetics, thinking exclusively looks to beings as things to be regulated, but overlooks—and is “closed off” from noticing—that it thereby already enacts a relation between being and thinking. Due to this occlusion, Heidegger associates cybernetics with the “oblivion of being” (Heidegger 1998b: 259).

In brief then, enclosure, unidirectionality, and occlusion surface as three points of reference that orient Heidegger’s ontological interpretation of cybernetics.

Cybernetics and the Anthropocene

Although the Anthropocene accords to Heidegger’s first reference point inasmuch as it offers a concrete experience of our being “enclosed” in cybernetics, it discords with the other two points concerning unidirectionality and occlusion. We therefore propose that the Anthropocene does not imply the ontological forgetfulness that Heidegger articulates as the oblivion of being. Rather, we will argue that the Earth in the Anthropocene engenders a reorientation of Heidegger’s interpretation, implying that instead of its oblivion, the Earth can be said to offer a concrete experience of the concealing-unconcealing of being.

To develop this claim, we confront the unidirectionality of cybernetics with the previously discussed twofold Earth (“The Anthropocene and the Intrusion of Asymmetry” section). When asked how the Earth relates to cybernetics, part of the answer is that it appears “enclosed” in the cybernetic “hegemonic domain”. As noted previously, this concerns the Earth as the symmetric oikos where things (e.g., coffee, empty fuel tanks, or the earth-system as such) are inescapably encountered in light of global warming and thus according to a collective measure of technological regulation (see “The Anthropocene as Cybernetic Phenomenon” section).

That, however, is only half the answer. The Earth in the Anthropocene is not only a being that is encountered according to a cybernetic relationality, but conjointly appears as the stage upon which the “hegemonic domain” of cybernetics concretely unfolds. This is to say that the Earth is conditioned by cybernetics insofar as it appears as a symmetric oikos that must be regulated, yet itself conversely conditions cybernetics insofar as our regulative encounter with things takes place on Earth as the oikos that ‘houses’ this encounter. As a first step, therefore, we can say that besides offering a concrete experience of our cybernetic enclosure (“The Anthropocene as Cybernetic Phenomenon” section), the Anthropocene further engenders a peculiar and literal concretion, i.e., a ‘growing together’ of cybernetics and the Earth.

Be that as it may, the mentioned con-cretion of cybernetics and the Earth remains trivial unless its ontological relevance can be brought out. In conditioning cybernetics by housing its “hegemonic domain,” the ontic Earth becomes ontologically relevant inasmuch as it engenders a reorientation of Heidegger’s unidirectional consideration of cybernetics. If cybernetics concerns an ontological relation between being and thinking, this relation is enacted by human existence inasmuch as it included in an ontological relationality (“The Anthropocene as Cybernetic Phenomenon” section). Human existence thus appears as a necessary condition for cybernetics. If, in turn, human existence requires an earthly oikos for its wherewithal, then by implication, the Earth surfaces as necessary condition for cybernetics (see Blok 2016). This outwardly trite observation is rendered pertinent by the Anthropocene, because the harrowing experience of the intrusion of the asymmetric Earth (“The Anthropocene and the Intrusion of Asymmetry” section) revokes our liberty of taking this condition for granted, and of ignoring how our cybernetic, symmetric oikos itself rests upon a transient Earthly support. If we thoughtfully pursue this experience, we can say that on the one hand, the Earth sustains the oikos upon which human existence can (with Heidegger: obliviously) enact a cybernetic, symmetric relation between being and thinking. On the other hand, in the Anthropocene, the intrusion of the asymmetric Earth renders explicit how the support that sustains this symmetric oikos is not at all unconditional. Instead, it is itself Earth-conditioned by way of a relatively stable exception to a deeply unstable and temperamental rule, where the short-lived chapter featuring humanity as protagonist is experienced to belong to the vast, turbulent, deep timely drama of volatile geo-dynamics that make up what D.T. Ansted once called “the great stone book” of the Earth (1863; see Szerzynski 2012). No longer just the tale of abstract geological science, today, the Earth’s asymmetry becomes distressingly tangible by the experience of global warming, foreboding that the brief anthropic chapter in this great stone book is approaching its final readable pages, since the Earth appears on the verge of withdrawing support for the transient, symmetric oikos that we inhabit. Three things follow from this diagnosis.

First, the concretion of cybernetics and the Earth occasions a reorientation of Heidegger’s unidirectional interpretation of the relation between the ontic and the ontological, since the Earth now attains a peculiar status. While the Earth as symmetric oikos concurs with Heidegger’s interpretation, this oikos itself appears only a minor moment in a major history of the Earth. As indicated, through the experience of the Anthropocene and the asymmetric Earth, today, the Earth appears in a novel way^Footnote12 that is incompatible with Heidegger’s unidirectional consideration of cybernetics. Since the being called the Earth is the condition of possibility for the oikos housing human existence, and since this oikos accordingly is the condition of possibility for ontological cybernetics inasmuch as it conditions the cybernetic relation between being and thinking, we can say that rather than being unidirectionally encountered as a being that merely accords to the ontological structuring of cybernetics, the Earth itself emerges as cybernetics’ ontic-ontological condition of possibility (see Zwier and Blok 2017; Blok 2016; Blok 2017).

Secondly, and further pursuing an interpretation of the first point, the concretion of cybernetics and the Earth suggests that cybernetics in the Anthropocene cannot be identified with the oblivion of concealing-unconcealing being. In contradistinction to Heidegger’s idea that the cybernetic “occlusion” and therewith associated “oblivion of being” can never be “disjointed” by occurrences at the ontic level (“Heidegger: Cybernetics and Oblivion” section), the twofold Earth of the Anthropocene in fact disjoints this occlusion. Rather than being fully enclosed in the collective measure of cybernetics, the ontic Earth qua symmetric oikos emerges (with Heidegger: is unconcealed) as condition and support for ontological cybernetics, whilst concurrently withdrawing from it (with Heidegger: concealing) inasmuch as the Earth is also alarmingly experienced to remain asymmetric to our cybernetic, symmetric oikos. In other words, although the Anthropocene engenders a concrete experience of our “enclosure” in cybernetics, this does not necessarily entail that we are “closed off” and oblivious to cybernetics as a destining. Instead, the peculiar con-cretion of cybernetics and the Earth in the Anthropocene offers an experience of how the symmetric, cybernetic structuring of reality in which we are inescapably included itself concerns a way of “unconcealment,” a way that is itself brought underway via a being named the Earth. This being is thereby not fully “enclosed” in the collective measure of symmetric cybernetics, but conceals itself inasmuch as it remains asymmetric to its unconcealed, briefly inhabitable oikos. In light of the abovementioned peculiar ontic-ontological status of the Earth, it must be stressed that such concealment does not merely pertain to a being that partly withdraws itself (like the dark side of the moon), but pertains to a being that conceals itself in conditioning the very possibility of concealment-unconcealment. As such, we can say that rather than oblivion, the ontic-ontological Earth of the Anthropocene fosters a concrete experience of the concealing-unconcealing of being.

Thirdly, the concretion of cybernetics and the Earth suggests that technology is more ontologically ambivalent and relevant than Heidegger allows for when he says that “scientific-technical planning and making” is always already included in the “most expansive feedback-loop” of cybernetics and can never “disjoint” its occlusion (Heidegger 1983: 145–146; see “Heidegger: Cybernetics and Oblivion” section). To elucidate this point, we note how the abovementioned experience of concealing-unconcealing being is deeply entangled with our technological activity. On the one hand, this experience is technologically mediated inasmuch as it is only through technologies like satellites and computers that we can encounter the Earth as warming globe and experience the associated intrusion of asymmetry (see Ihde 2016: 77–88; Zwier and Blok 2017). On the other hand, the experience of asymmetry emerges in concert with the necessity of responding to its intrusion, and countering it by technologically regulating our Earthly habitat. Now, while such technological regulation clearly adheres to the collective measure, i.e., the symmetry of cybernetics, it is significant that it consists in a counter-measure to something disturbingly asymmetric. And as a counter-measure, our “scientific-technical planning and making” is not only included in the “most expansive feedback-loop” of cybernetics governing our symmetric oikos, but explicitly involves a responsivity to what remains excluded, i.e., asymmetric to this oikos and the cybernetic “hegemonic domain” that it supports. This is to say that although technology appears “enclosed” in cybernetics, it is not necessarily ontologically “closed off” and oblivious. Rather, it involves a responsivity to what remains asymmetric to the collective measure, i.e., the symmetry to which technology adheres. In short, in light of the anthropocenic concretion of cybernetics and the Earth, technology comes under consideration as both symmetrically enclosed and as opening towards asymmetry.

Before turning to the question that follows from this, namely how we might understand this responsivity and technological opening towards asymmetry, we first summarize the above. In the Anthropocene, the Earth appears as ontic-ontological condition of possibility for ontological cybernetics. This concretion of cybernetics and the Earth implies that the Earth is not merely a being that is encountered from within a cybernetic relationality, since this only applies to the Earth qua oikos governed by cybernetic symmetry, but not to the Earth that withdraws from cybernetics in the sense of remaining asymmetric to it. Since the Anthropocene heralds the intrusion of such asymmetry, the Earth now offers a concrete experience of the concealing-unconcealing of being. Finally, given how this indication is deeply entangled with our technological activity, technology appears less enclosed, closed off, and ontologically oblivious than Heidegger’s interpretation of cybernetics has it. Rather than hermetically enclosed in the collective measure of symmetric cybernetics, technology qua counter-measure becomes responsive and therefore open to what remains asymmetric to it.

Now, while it is clear that an engagement with Heidegger’s thought on phenomenology and cybernetics gives rise to the idea of technology and asymmetry, its further investigation must part ways with Heidegger. The reason for this is that Heidegger neither considers the above elucidated ontic-ontological Earth nor the technological opening towards asymmetry that follows from it.^Footnote13 Whilst Heidegger solely understands technological activity as included in cybernetics and thus as exclusively symmetric, the Anthropocene compels us to question technology beyond its cybernetic enclosure.

In what follows, we therefore part ways with Heidegger to encounter in Georges Bataille a thinker whose consideration of technology flanks Heidegger’s, yet diverges from it inasmuch as it articulates an asymmetry on the part of technology, thus allowing us to come to terms with technology in relation to both the symmetric and asymmetric Earth.^Footnote14

Bataille: Asymmetry and Technology

Although Bataille does not systematically engage with the question of technology as such, the way in which it figures in his diagnosis of human existence is instructive for understanding the implications of the aforementioned technological rapport with the Earth, as well as the associated opening towards asymmetry. In what follows, we will see how contrary to Heidegger, Bataille allows for a consideration of an ontological asymmetry that is engendered by technology itself.

Aversive Technology

To see this, we begin by noting how Bataille takes technology to characterize the way in which human existence inhabits the Earth. This habitation is typified by a technically induced aversion from that which constitutes humanity in the first place, namely nature. Nature is understood in terms of what Bataille calls “the general economy” (1991), which is principally characterized by abundance, meaning that the energetic abundance of the sun constitutes natural organisms and propels life on the surface of the Earth. Bataille takes it as “a basic fact” that because the influx of solar energy is unremitting, natural organisms receive more energy than strictly required for maintaining life, resulting in excess energy (Bataille 1991: 21). He articulates this in terms of “pressure” (1991: 29–36), the first effect of which is expansion, as this reduces pressure via spatial distribution. If otherwise unhindered, growth eventually runs up against spatial limits, and since the sun remains impartial to such limits and continues to relentlessly bestow its energizing gift, surplus energy can eventually no longer be incorporated via growth, but must be dissipated or wasted. In nature, therefore, “the impossibility of continuing growth makes way for squander” (1991: 29) via “the production of increasingly burdensome forms of life” (1991: 33). Where, for instance, plants make relatively efficient use of the sun’s gift for growth,^Footnote15 higher organisms eat plants and other animals without growing to the same extent, thus making self-preservation and growth a more ‘burdensome’ affair. Additionally, the extravagant, intricate, and painstakingly extensive sexual behaviours of higher organisms imply a relatively inefficient way of procreation: “the mammalian organism is a gulf that swallows vast quantities of energy” (Bataille 1986: 60; see Stoekl 2007b: 255). Bataille does thereby not deny that natural life occasionally faces shortages and accordingly engages in a struggle for survival, but he interprets such a struggle as constituted by, and partaking in the general movement of energy that is characterized by abundance and ultimately by squander. For example, a hungry lion faces a shortage of food, but its hunting and eating of a zebra (which itself ‘swallows vast quantities of energy’ by inefficiently feeding on grass) partakes in the carnivorous squander of the abundant energy that constitutes the grass, the zebra, and the lion. Were we to align Bataille’s ideas with the previous discussion of Heidegger, phenomenology, and cybernetics, we might say that while the ontic level of individually constituted beings may face scarcity and struggle, the ontological constitution as such is characterized by the abundance of the general economy.^Footnote16

Now, for Bataille, natural organisms are fully immersed in nature “like water in water” (1989a: 19), implying that they blindly partake in both the struggle for survival and implicated squander of energy. Conversely, he interprets the human being as the natural organism that, by way of technology, averts from nature and from the general economy that constitutes it,^Footnote17 meaning that humans enter into a specific, namely forgetful relation with the energy that (ontologically) constitutes them.

Bataille refers to this forgetful relation as the “restricted economy” (1991: 19–41). This means that human existence restricts its dealings to individual beings and goods, thereby forgetting about the abundance of the general economy that ontologically constitutes such beings. Analogous to our colloquial understanding of economy, the restricted economy is characterized by scarcity, necessity, and work. In averting from nature and the general economy, human existence abhors the re-submergence in nature called death (Bataille 2007: 73, 79–86), and the corresponding strife for self-maintenance evidently needs resources that do not come naturally, but are considered as scarce goods, thus demanding productive work to compensate for this deficit. One may think of agriculture as an example, where the constitutive abundance of the sun is forgotten inasmuch as its energy is ‘restrictively’ encountered as a scarce good that needs to be put to work in order to secure a good harvest, the crops of which are similarly considered as scarce goods to be traded in an economy where their value derives from supply and demand (see Zwier et al. 2015: 360–362).

Yet although human existence in the restricted economy seems similar to a hungry lion inasmuch as both strive towards self-maintenance, Bataille stresses that:

The purpose of a plow is alien to the reality that constitutes it; and (…) the same is true of a grain of wheat or a calf. (Bataille 1989a: 41).

This is to say that whereas a lion is immersed in the “reality that constitutes it” (like water in water), technology (e.g., the plow) induces human existence to engage in an ‘alienated’, i.e., averted relation to this reality. This differs from the lion’s natural immersion in two significant ways, both of which turn out to be relevant to the Anthropocene.

First, encountering things according to the restricted economy involves thinking, namely “the consciousness of a necessity, or an indigence” (Bataille 1991: 23), where we think that work is needed to meet our necessities. Aligning this with our discussion of phenomenology (“The Anthropocene as Cybernetic Phenomenon” section), we can interpret the restricted economy as a relation between being and thinking, where being (with Bataille: the constitutive “reality” in the above citation) is thought of in terms of beings that are scarce, needed, and thus require work. This is relevant to our discussion of the Anthropocene, because this ‘restricted’ relation between being and thinking resonates with Heidegger’s interpretation of cybernetics, given how both articulate an encounter with beings that is principally characterized by regulative, purposeful work. We can therefore say that due to a technologically induced aversion, humanity enters into the restricted economy and thus comes to inhabit the Earth as symmetric oikos, in which being and thinking become symmetric inasmuch as their relation is structured according to the collective measure, i.e., symmetry of scarcity, necessity, and (regulative) work.

Secondly, for Bataille, the aversion that gives rise to this symmetric, ‘restricted’ encounter with things is never definitive. Instead, human existence in the restricted economy remains exposed to what it averts from in two ways, which we will discuss as abundance and waste. Our hypothesis is that this twofold exposure is relevant for questioning technology in the Anthropocene, because it implies that the technologically induced aversion and associated forgetful habitation of the Earth as oikos in which being and thinking become symmetric, comes to be reminded of that what constitutes it whilst remaining asymmetric to it.^Footnote18 Understanding technology in this way allows for addressing the question raised at the end of the “Phenomenon and Asymmetry” section, thus coming to terms with technology’s opening towards asymmetry.

Aversion and Abundance

Abundance implies that the symmetric, restricted way of encountering beings is not definitive, because the technologically induced aversion and associated habitation of a symmetric oikos does not disconnect this oikos from the abundance that constitutes it. Although forgetful of the constitutive abundance of the general economy, human existence remains subjected to its ceaseless influx of energy. Bataille’s twofold diagnosis of his own time is instructive here: first of all, in considering energy as a scarce good of which more is always needed, modern, industrial humanity accumulates and produces massive amounts of energy via large-scale extraction of fossil fuels and nuclear power (see Stoekl 2007a: 40–41). Secondly, forgetfulness of the general economy gives rise to equating a healthy economy with a growing economy, which celebrates employment whilst scowling at wastefulness.^Footnote19 Bataille sees the pairing of the two as a recipe for catastrophe: because the large influx of energy is not allowed to be wasted, the human oikos can only expand under the pressure of abundance (which is welcomed as economic growth). However, when growth eventually runs out of space, pressure builds up, and as with any limited system that is subjected to increasing pressure, it ultimately explodes. Writing in the aftermath of two world wars which he understands as “the greatest orgies of wealth that history has recorded” (1991: 37), Bataille envisages—with Argus’ eyes—the eruption of another war as the explosive and catastrophic outcome of (or rather outlet for) uncontainable pressure. As with other constituents of the general economy, “the impossibility of continuing growth makes way for squander” (1991: 29), which in the case of forgetful human existence takes the catastrophic form of war. In this way, the restricted way of encountering things in terms of scarcity, necessity, and (regulative) work—i.e., habitation of a symmetric oikos—is not definitive and must ultimately come to terms with what remains asymmetric to it, as it postpones but cannot avoid the consequences of its abundance-driven constitution.

Still, because of their technologically induced aversion, humans are unlike other natural organisms, and do not blindly, but forgetfully partake in the growth and squander engendered by the abundance of the general economy. On the one hand, in light of its recipe for catastrophe, Bataille considers such forgetfulness “a failure of humanity” (2007: 15; see 1991: 21). On the other hand, because human existence is not blindly preordained to this failure, Bataille envisages an alternative.

In exploring this alternative, Bataille investigates cultural history for ways of “exhausting the surplus without war” (2007: 428), and finds a pressure exhaust in the ritual of potlatch, where the indigenous people in the American northwest wasted surplus energy by way of the destruction of accumulated and produced resources, for instance by killing one’s own slaves, wrecking one’s canoes, up to setting one’s own village on fire (Bataille 1991: 67–68). Other examples include pyramids as a rather inefficient burial method (1991: 119), Lamaist monks who avoided activity in contemplative life, thus dissipating the surplus generated by Tibetan workers (1991: 93–110), jewels, works of art (Bataille 1989b; see Wendlin 2007: 39), and eroticism (Bataille 1986; 2007). All of these indicate a different relation to energy: rather than considering it a scarce good to be put to work, they acknowledge rather than forget its constitutive abundance, accordingly attesting to how “it is not necessity but its contrary, “luxury” that presents living matter and mankind with their fundamental problems” (Bataille 1991: 12).

While more must and will be said about such a way of confronting abundance and the Anthropocene, we first recapitulate how technology figures in all of this. On the one hand, technology induces an aversion from nature and the general economy, thus facilitating habitation of an oikos that is characterized by a symmetric relation between being and thinking, meaning that beings are encountered in terms of the restricted economy of scarcity, necessity, and (regulative) work. As aversive, technology engenders forgetfulness of the constitutive abundance of the general economy, leading the human symmetric oikos to expand. On the other hand, inasmuch as this forgetful aversion remains exposed to the general economy, technology also gives rise to a specific (catastrophic or other) confrontation with the abundance that remains asymmetric to it.

Translating all of this to the Anthropocene, we can see the Anthropocene as a concrete manifestation of the human symmetric oikos being exposed to the abundance of the general economy. If abundance engenders pressure which in turn effects expansion, the Anthropocene can be seen as its result. Whatever its exact starting point, it is clear that the Anthropocene involves an enormous increase of human beings on the planet since that point, paired with an equally tremendous accumulation, production, and transformation of natural and energetic resources. The following graphs depicting “the great acceleration” (Fig. 1) express this better than anything:

In light of this expansion, we can see the Anthropocene as an effect of humanity’s (technologically induced) aversion from the general economy and associated entrenchment in the restricted economy. If such entrenchment entails forgetfulness of the constitutive abundance of the general economy, and if such forgetfulness entails that the human, symmetric oikos must expand (given how energy appears a scarce good to be accumulated and not wasted), then the Anthropocene has this oikos expanding to a planetary scale, thereby rendering its anthropic inhabitant the dominant geological factor.

With Bataille, therefore, we can add an economic dimension to our previous discussion of cybernetics. We have seen how the Anthropocene offers a concretisation of our inclusion in a cybernetic, symmetric relationality (“The Anthropocene as Cybernetic Phenomenon” section). We can now interpret this relationality to belong to a technologically induced aversion from the general economy, by which humanity comes to inhabit the Earth as the oikos in which being and thinking become symmetric. As with Heidegger’s cybernetics, this symmetrical way of encountering things is ontologically forgetful (“Phenomenon and Asymmetry” section). Unlike Heidegger, however, it is not wholly “closed off,” since the aversion that engenders such forgetfulness is not definitive, as it postpones but cannot avoid the consequences of its abundance-driven constitution. What follows is that the forgetful, symmetric way of encountering things and goods eventually comes to be reminded of its forgetfulness and must therefore, whether catastrophically or other, come to terms with the constitutive abundance that remains asymmetric to it.

Be that as it may, in the Anthropocene, this reminder of forgetfulness occurs in another significant way as well. We therefore turn to waste as the second way by which human existence remains exposed to what is averts from.

Unceasing Departure: Aversion and Waste

As noted, human existence averts from nature, meaning that instead of being immersed ‘like water in water,’ humans depart from nature to enter into a specific, forgetful relation with it. This aversion is not definitively forgetful, because human existence remains exposed to the nature from which it averts “and from which man does not cease to have departed” (Bataille 2007: 62).

For Bataille, this unceasing departure from nature is evidenced by “the horror of nature, which was the first movement of the process (…) that established humanity” (2007: 77). This horror becomes most eminently manifest in the form of our own abhorred natural waste: decaying corpses, vomit, faeces, urine, menstrual blood, the odour of sweat, etc. (Bataille 2007: 61–88). Whilst from the perspective of nature, there is nothing extraordinary about these dejecta (faeces are simply a resource for the continuation of organic life, as are rotting corpses),^Footnote20 they invoke disgust and abhorrence in us, because they serve as a horrific reminder of a nature with which we no longer coincide inasmuch as we have averted from it.

If technology induces this aversion or departure from nature, it also serves to contain the horrors associated with not having ceased this depart from it. Think of sewer-systems, toilets, tampons, deodorant, cemeteries, etc. Such containment is rather successful, particularly in highly technological societies (see Scanlan 2005), but is never flawless and definitive, e.g., when we occasionally encounter an unflushed, rancid toilet, or are overwhelmed by the fetid stench of a passing garbage truck. In those cases, when technological containment momentarily hampers and we are confronted with our natural waste, we usually shudder, flush the toilet, avert ourselves once more, and go about our business. Technology then both induces the departure from nature, and serves to contain its consequent horrors, thus affording human existence to mostly forget about its unceasing departure.

What does this have to do with the Anthropocene? In the Anthropocene, we are confronted with the waste that technology itself dejects in its aversion from nature and the general economy. We have seen how it is due to this aversion that the Earth becomes inhabited as symmetric oikos, which the Anthropocene concretely demonstrates by the expansion of the human oikos via the large-scale exploitation of fossil fuels. Indeed, it is only because of the (symmetric and infernal) coupling of humans and fossil fuels that the Anthropos becomes the dominant geo-force (“The Anthropocene and the Intrusion of Asymmetry” section). Now, the waste of this combustive exploitation goes under the name of CO₂.^Footnote21 We propose that in the Anthropocene, it acquires a status once occupied by natural dejecta.

In order to see this, we must engage in a phenomenological exercise and investigate the experience of CO₂. The first thing to note is that we neither directly see CO₂, nor experience the horrific disgust as when confronted with vomit, faeces, or rotting corpses. We only have a remote experience of CO₂—as data rendered in graphs. Be that as it may, in the Anthropocene, CO₂ encroaches and becomes less and less remote. Consider the following graph on “Atmospheric CO₂” (Fig. 2):

If we let this graph sink in, it becomes something other than just another graph depicting abstract and remote scientific data. Instead, put phenomenologically, it quite literally sinks in, namely into the very way in which we encounter the world, as it becomes concrete in the sense of growing together with everything we see, as if etched in our peripheral vision. The line above 400 ppm attaches itself to the trails of airplanes we see when looking at the sky, to the freight train carrying a batch of new cars to the harbour, to the warning light signalling an empty fuel tank, to the adverts for exotic holiday destinations, to the trees in the garden, the powerlines across the field, etc.

When pausing over what this (concrete, sunk in) graph actually says, one feels queasy to say the least—one dreads it and feels gutted. Why? Because in engendering global warming, CO₂ stands as a stark reminder of how the symmetric, fossil-fueled, and now planetary oikos that we inhabit and usually take for granted, remains encompassed by the asymmetric Earth that constitutes it and momentarily grants it stable support. And through the fumes of CO₂ that thicken the air, we behold the intrusion of the asymmetric Earth, the associated withdrawal of stable support, and catch a glimpse of how this stable support is but an exception to the rule of a deeply unstable and unsettled Earth (“The Anthropocene and the Intrusion of Asymmetry” section).

It is for this reason that in the Anthropocene, CO₂ can be ascribed similar status as natural dejecta. As with natural dejecta, there is nothing extraordinary about CO₂ from the perspective of the Earth as such, since it is but one of many parameters of the cybernetic earth-system, including natural life for which it is a resource. Yet for human existence, it emerges as a horrific souvenir of unceasing departure. Where natural dejecta remind of a constitutive nature from which human existence does not cease to depart, CO₂ horrifically reminds of how our oikos on the symmetric Earth does not cease to depart from the Earth that constitutes it and remains asymmetric to it.

The response to the confrontation with the horrific waste of CO₂ follows along this parallel, as it consists in once more averting oneself by way of technology. In the same way that technologies like toilets and cemeteries contain natural dejecta, we can buy carbon compensation when booking a flight, drink ecologically certified coffee from “100% biodegradable” cups, and put up solar panels to contain CO₂. In contrast to natural waste however, the Anthropocene testifies to a clogged toilet, no longer able to contain the flurry of waste. This is to say that technologically containing and thus averting from the waste called CO₂ becomes increasingly impossible as the fumes linger. One of the dreaded lessons that earth-system science teaches is that CO₂ is not simply present or absent, and cannot simply be flushed, since it figures as a parameter in all kinds of intricate cybernetic feedback-loops of the earth-system, including positive loops. As a simple example, if CO₂ engenders global warming and effects the melting of the arctic, less sunlight is reflected, thus fomenting further warming, more rapid melting, even less reflection, etc. (ad nauseam indeed). Hence, whereas with respect to the horrific reminder of natural dejecta, technological containment affords human existence to mostly forget about its departure from nature and go about its business, the dejecta of CO₂—the very waste-trail of this technologically fuelled departure—cannot be contained in this way, and therefore do not allow for forgetting about our unceasing departure from the asymmetric Earth.

What follows, in sum, is that while technology induces an aversion that proceeds towards symmetry and habitation of the Earth as a symmetric oikos, the waste-trail of CO₂ engendered by this technological aversion compels—through the fumes—an experience of how human existence does not cease to avert from that from which remains asymmetric to it.

Conclusion: Asymmetric Exposure

Compounding the previous sections, we can interpret the Anthropocene as the time in which we are inescapably reminded of asymmetry, since the Anthropocene concretely shows that the technological, restricted symmetry is not definitive, but is instead confronted with what remains asymmetric to it. On the one hand, the Anthropocene appears as an effect of our technologically induced, forgetful diversion from the abundance of the general economy, where continued exposure to this constitutive abundance entails that under pressure, our symmetric oikos expands to planetary dimensions, and continues to do so, even in (twi)light of horrific CO₂. We can take this as another indication of the pressurizing general economy, i.e., the asymmetric constitutive abundance from which symmetric human existence continues to divert, with no foreseeable end in sight. On the other hand, the very waste-trail exhausted by this technological diversion binds our eyes to a foreseeable end, as it compels—through the fumes—attention to the intrusion of the asymmetric Earth. The technological waste of CO₂ thereby comes to serve as a horrific reminder of how our symmetric oikos does not cease to depart from the asymmetric Earth, whilst alarmingly signalling how it stands on the verge of in fact ceasing from this departure and collapsing back into its earthly bedrock.

From this confrontation between Heidegger and Bataille in the Anthropocene, we conclude that technology in the Anthropocene is ontologically forgetful, but not wholly oblivious. Retracing our steps, we saw Heidegger associating technological activity with the oblivion of being, since he considers it to be both “enclosed” and “closed off” from the ontological destining of cybernetics and its collective measure or symmetry of regulation (“Phenomenon and Asymmetry” section). We refused Heidegger’s interpretation by arguing that the ontic-ontological Earth offers an experience of the concealing-unconcealing of being. Furthermore, since this experience is deeply entangled with technology, we intimated that technology involves an opening towards asymmetry, because its regulative symmetry appears as a counter-measure to the intrusion of the asymmetric Earth. At this stage, it should be stressed that such an opening towards asymmetry does not merely imply an awareness of something that technology cannot (yet) master and bring under its collective measure. Rather, due to its rapport with the ontic-ontological Earth as that what conditions our technological encounter with things, the stated opening towards asymmetry allows for an experience of our technological, regulative encounters as a mode of encounter that is itself ‘meted out’ by the process of concealing-unconcealing being. This then illustrates technology’s twofold ontological relevance insofar as it relates both to the (unconcealed) Earth understood as the symmetric oikos that conditions cybernetics which encloses technological activity, whilst concurrently relating to the Earth that withdraws (or conceals itself) from this enclosure by remaining asymmetric to it.

Bataille helps to further understand this technological opening towards asymmetry, since he articulates how technology induces a diversion that proceeds towards symmetry, but does not, due to abundance and waste, definitely accomplish a symmetric enclosure. On the one hand then, technology is forgetful, given how it induces human existence to divert from nature and the abundance of the general economy that constitutes it, engendering a forgetful entrenchment in the restricted economy and habitation of the Earth as the oikos in which being and thinking become symmetric. The Anthropocene concretely gives the reckoning of this, as the human oikos expands to planetary dimensions, rendering its forgetful inhabitant the dominant geo-force. Furthermore, inasmuch as it serves to contain the horrific natural dejecta that remind human existence of its departure from nature, technology affords forgetfulness of its own diversion.

On the other hand, in the Anthropocene, the uncontainable waste-trail of this technological diversion itself—CO₂—emerges as the horrific souvenir that retaliates against forgetfulness. By way of its own dejecta, technology can then be said to come to terms with itself as it awakens a twofold memory, incriminating what technology diverts from (the asymmetric Earth and the general economy), and that it unceasingly does so.

We therefore conclude that the Anthropocene gives rise to a twofold conceptualization of technology according to which technology becomes ontologically significant. First, technology is conceptualized as always already and forgetfully “enclosed” in a symmetric relation between being and thinking. Secondly, technology offers a reminder of how its own symmetric enclosure results from an unceasing diversion from that which remains asymmetric to it. On the one hand, technology diverts from the asymmetric Earth as the ontic-ontological condition for the oikos that supports technology’s symmetric enclosure (“Phenomenon and Asymmetry” section). On the other hand, technology diverts from the general economy to which this oikos remains exposed (“Bataille: Asymmetry and Technology” section). This conceptualization is ontologically significant, because in coming to terms with its own forgetful diversion, technology fosters—through the fumes—responsivity to being, i.e., to what always already structures how we symmetrically encounter things, whilst remaining asymmetric to this encounter.

Such a conceptualization of technology is relevant for philosophy of technology in the Anthropocene, particularly in light of how various symptoms of the asymmetric Earth’s intrusion (e.g., global warming, atmospheric CO₂, im-permafrost etc.) are now being met with technological responses. Examples include initiatives like ‘circular bio-based economy’ (see Zwier et al. 2015), ‘clean energy,’ up to ‘geo-engineering’ and the like (see Hamilton 2013). While acknowledging the asymmetry of the Earth, such initiatives are oriented towards symmetry inasmuch as they attempt to keep the asymmetric Earth at bay by (re)introducing runaway earth-system parameters into a regulative feedback loop, thus safeguarding habitability. We maintain that philosophy of technology cannot avoid acknowledging the need for such initiatives. Whereas the role of technology will increasingly consist in symmetric maintenance of our habitat by regulating the fumes exhausted by our technological modus vivendi, it is the vocation of the philosophy of technology to diagnose this modus, to see through the fumes and cultivate the question what today’s confrontation between technology and the Earth means for its forgetful yet responsive inhabitants.

Notes

1. The concept of the Anthropocene has come to be interpreted in a vast variety of ways. Instead of exhaustively covering its many (critical and eulogistic) conceptualizations, we here limit ourselves to an interpretation of the Anthropocene as phenomenon. For a good overview of the discourse on the Anthropocene, see Lorimer (2016).
2. Given the focus of this paper on phenomenology, technology, and the Anthropocene, our discussion of cybernetics will be limited to Heidegger’s interpretation of cybernetics as “foundational science”. The broader question regarding the relation between Heidegger’s cybernetics and other interpretations is therefore left open. For an instructive overview of such interpretations, see Hayles (1999).
3. We thank one of the anonymous reviewers for bringing the approach of resilience thinking to our attention.
4. We will return to the question of waste (here: the used-up coffee container) in the “Bataille: Asymmetry and Technology” and “Conclusion: Asymmetric Exposure” sections.
5. Heidegger himself links cybernetics and phenomenology when he discusses cybernetic “steering” as “phenomenon” in the seminars on Heraclitus, fragment 64 (see Heidegger and Fink 1979: 10–14).
6. As noted, “cybernetic science” must here be ontologically understood as “foundational science”.
7. This also shows how Heidegger’s interpretation of cybernetics can be read as a different articulation of his questioning of technology (see Heidegger 1977). In “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” Heidegger writes: “[The] fundamental characteristic of [the] scientific attitude is its cybernetic, that is, technological character” (Heidegger 1972: 58). For an analysis of Heidegger’s questioning of technology in relation to the Anthropocene, see Zwier and Blok (2017); Williston (2017).
8. What we here articulate as the intrusion of the asymmetric Earth resonates with what Isabelle Stengers has called “the intrusion of Gaia,” implying “the need to take into account a protagonist that will never recede into the background, and whose the [sic] stability ‘we’ will never again be able to take for granted (2015: 137). Given the complicated nature of the current discourse on Gaia (see Stengers 2009; Latour 2017; Crutzen 2004) further elaboration of this protagonist would exceed the scope of this paper.
9. In literature on Heidegger, such unidirectionality is sometimes referred to as “onto-centrism” (see Blok 2016: 459).
10. This is or course not to say that a tree no longer appears as impressive, beautiful, important etc., but rather means that such experience of beauty is inescapably bound up with the threat of global warming, thereby potentially inciting us to regulate the preservation or multiplication of trees.
11. In his questioning of technology (see note 7), Heidegger articulates this as the “Danger of Technology” (1977: 27). For a discussion of this danger in relation to the Anthropocene, see Zwier and Blok 2017.
12. As noted in “The Anthropocene and the Intrusion of Asymmetry” section, objective sciences such as geology and earth-system science have of course long since known about the fact of the asymmetric Earth (e.g., its being much older than human civilisation, more inhospitable than appears at first glance, etc.). However, whereas their propositions concern the Earth or earth-system as scientific object (and thus already unquestioningly enact a theorizing relation between being and thinking, see “The Anthropocene as Cybernetic Phenomenon” section), the experience of the Anthropocene wrests this knowledge from the objective, scientific domain. Phenomenologically speaking, the asymmetry of the Earth no longer merely concerns the ontic domain of a being called the Earth, but comes to pertain to the ontological, cybernetic relation between being and thinking as enacted in our contemporary encounter with the Earth and earthly beings.
13. It may strike the reader that an explicit confrontation with Heidegger’s thematization of Earth remains absent here. On the one hand, this absence may be explained by the fact that although Heidegger speaks of the Earth on various occasions, it never comes under consideration in its Anthropocenic manifestation as the ontic-ontological condition for the destining of cybernetics—which is the central theme of this paper. On the other hand, we should note that the arguments presented here build on a more explicit analysis of Heidegger and the Earth as presented in Blok (2016). For a good discussion of Heidegger and the Earth, see Haar (1993).
14. In what follows, we will interpret Bataille in light of the previous discussion of Heidegger, thereby aligning their often diverging vocabularies by casting them in the same mould. The idea behind such an alignment is that it allows us to address the issue of technology and asymmetry in relation to both Heidegger’s thought and the phenomenon of the Anthropocene. For a more generally oriented confrontation between Heidegger and Bataille, see Comay (1990), Lee Jr. (2007).
15. Although relatively efficient (in comparison to higher organisms), plants also involve their own ‘burdensome’ ways, e.g. the fruitless sexuality of flowering plants (see Wendlin 2007: 39).
16. Bataille of course does not put any of this in terms of ‘ontic’ and ‘ontological’ or in relation to Heidegger’s ontological difference. However, we maintain that Bataille’s differentiation of constituted beings and their constitution as such (the general economy) can—to a certain extent as we shall see—be aligned with Heidegger’s differentiation of being and beings. As will be argued, doing so is significant for understanding technology and asymmetry in the Anthropocene.
17. With respect to this aversion, Bataille follows a Hegalian trajectory: “Man is the animal that negates nature: he negates it through labor, which destroys it and changes it into an artificial world; he negates it in the case of life-creating activity; he negates it in the case of death.” (2007: 61; see 52). For an elaborate discussion of Bataille’s Hegel interpretation, see Gemerchak (2003). For a discussion of Hegelian negation, the Anthropocene, and the Earth, see Zwart (2017).
18. This is specific to humanity: immersed in nature like water in water, a lion neither forgets nor is reminded of the general economy.
19. Elaborately analyzing Bataille’s (cultural) diagnosis of how this entrenchment and associated forgetfulness of the general economy came about—in which the rise of Protestantism, capitalism, and industrialism are central—is beyond the scope of this paper (see Bataille 1991: particularly 115–141).
20. In this regard, Bataille also notes how “the [human] loathing of decay (…) is not shared by animals” (2007: 79).
21. CO₂ is obviously not the only form of waste exhausted by the anthropic geo-force, but it is arguably the most significant, as evidenced by the fact that the impact of other forms of waste are often expressed in CO₂-equivalence (CO₂-e).

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Authors and Affiliations

1. Faculty of Science, Institute for Science in Society, Radboud University Nijmegen, Heyendaalseweg 135, 6525 AJ, Nijmegen, The NetherlandsJochem Zwier
2. Department of Social Sciences; Subdivision Philosophy, Wageningen University and Research, Hollandseweg 1, Wageningen, 6706 KN, The NetherlandsVincent Blok

Cite this article

Zwier, J., Blok, V. Seeing Through the Fumes: Technology and Asymmetry in the Anthropocene. Hum Stud 42, 621–646 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-019-09508-4